I was chosen to continue to work on the websites over the course of the summer as one of the post-production interns. During that time, I did research on Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, a very talented eighteenth-century French painter whose self-portrait is in the center of the Tessé Room. Mademoiselle Ducreux was the daughter of Joseph Ducreux, one of Marie Antoinette’s official court painters. Their family connection was so close to the ill-fated queen that Rose’s younger sister was Marie Antoinette’s goddaughter and namesake. In my pages on the portrait in Uses of Space, I used visual comparisons and short, museum blurb-like text to illuminate my conclusions about female autonomy in the late eighteenth-century and learn more about the history of connoisseurship of women artist in this time by exploring both the style of the painting and its social history. The task was so enlightening and illuminating that I decided to write my thesis on it, in which I will use digital humanities approaches to tackle the issues of connoisseurship with women painters during this period, whose work is often attributed to figures as renowned as Jacques-Louis David, as Decreux’s was.

With my senior thesis, I intend to investigate the revolutionary artistic roles women engaged in during the Enlightenment and re-illuminate their too often overlooked accomplishments by utilizing digital technology, building upon research completed under the guidance of Professor Higonnet during the spring and summer of 2015. The Metropolitan Museum’s Tessé Room (c.1768-72) is a period room void of the people who once brought it to life; by looking at the objects inside the room and the people who created them, I hope to place the people back into the room.

In 1988 scholar Joseph Baillio conducted research into Rose Ducreux (1761-1802), reattributing the Tessé Room’s Self-Portrait with Harp and other works to her. I intend to build upon this work by looking at the role these portraits have played in a social context throughout their history. I will explore the social conditions that, to quote Professor Higonnet, led to “one of the most fundamental Enlightenment inventions: the domestic interior as we still know it, an interior predicated on individualism and global trade, created by artisans and managed by servants for a social elite.” My thesis will combine traditional art historical research with new technological applications, culminating with both a traditional written thesis and a collaborative digital public project, accessible via permanent website exhibit.

By using the case of Ducreux, the daughter of Marie Antoinette’s portraitist and an accomplished artist in her own right, I will investigate the ways women began to picture themselves during the eighteenth-century, and how that was received, both contemporaneously and in retrospect. Ducreux’s Self-Portrait was initially lauded as muse-like and graceful, showing off her skill as an artist and her enlightened upbringing. It was purchased in 1905 by Mrs. Jeanette Bliss, a New York collector and admirer of Marie Antoinette, and installed in her home salon adjacent to a harp that once belonged to the queen. Here, the portrait served as a symbol of Mrs. Bliss’s own individuality and interiority, playing the role of Muse to her, while also suggesting how she viewed herself. Today, hanging in the center of the Tessé Room, the portrait unites two gilt-bronze and lacquer secretaries that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, visually symbolizing the decadence that modern viewers imagine when they think of eighteenth-century France. Taken together, I hope to illuminate the proliferation of Enlightenment ideals through the movement of the portrait and its life in its various homes.