I’ve been very lucky this semester while working on my thesis. I am currently enrolled in an art history seminar that is taught at the Metropolitain Museum of Art by a curator, and she has helped to arrange access to the curatorial file for the self-portrait by Rose Ducreux and a high resolution scan of the painting, both of which have been of incredible value to my project. Given that the portrait hangs in the Wrightsman Galleries, far behind a barrier, the high resolution image is the closest that we can get to the painting at the moment.

I met with Alex Gil to discuss options for the digital presentation of my thesis project, and we discussed the really innovative things that are occurring with digital brush stroke analysis, as was done with a set of van Gogh works for artist identification. Unfortunately, brush stroke analysis involves both a highly technical background that I do not have the time to achieve before the end of the year, and a much larger sample size than is available for Ducreux. It also works much better for more modern artists, like the impressionists, who applied paint with highly visible brushstrokes, and not for traditional oil technique.

Instead, I think that doing side by side comparisons of paintings with close-up comparisons of details will effectively make my points about connoisseurship and the history of attributions for the Ducreux portrait in the Met’s collection. I’ve been working on gathering comparison images, and with Professor Higonnet’s aide I have narrowed it down to those that are the most relevant. I am gathering and requesting high resolution images of those that are available, and beginning to map a hierarchy that shows the history of attributions for Ducreux’s work.

Next week, Avery and I are going to travel to Hartford to visit the Wadsworth Athenaeum, where they several paintings by eighteenth-century French artists that I hope will be helpful for my connoisseurship project, as well as a large collection of Sèvres porcelain that Avery is eager to see.

I’ve been quite lucky, in that female artists are receiving quite a bit of attention in museums this year: the NYPL has an exhibition currently on female print makers, and I am arranging to see some of the prints up close, and there is currently a major exhibit on Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, which will be traveling to the Met in February. One of the paintings that is in the exhibit is the 1799 portrait of a young woman that was previously attributed to Ducreux, so I am very eager to see it up close, and feel incredibly fortunate that so many things have worked out in my favor while working on my thesis thus far.