Below is the project proposal I submitted:

Servants Were There, Too

My individual contribution to the Virtual Enlightenment Digital Project will be to focus on the role of servants and enslaved people in domestic spaces, specifically those occupied by and associated with upper class, wealthy families of France during the Enlightenment era. I am extremely interested in highlighting the presence of lower- and working-class people, particularly women and racial minorities, in private spaces in the home. Using models like the Tessé room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European Sculpture and Decorative Art as a backdrop, I hope to create a realistic understanding for the public about how these rooms were used by all the people who inhabited them, whether they were servants or the family of the house. The Met had an exhibition in 2006 entitled, “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century,” which placed elegant figures with elaborate costumes in various spaces in the ESDA Period Rooms. However, these figures only seemed to represent the upper-tier of society, the users we think of first when imagining these spaces. However, in reality, those who occupied these types of rooms the most were most likely those unable to use the space in a leisurely manner: servants would be constantly cleaning and tidying up these rooms for their employers. By denying that servants were, to a certain extent, “users” of this space is purposefully erasing a part of history we know to have existed.

The primary digital tool I will be utilizing will be Photoshop, in order to place servants within a room. In addition, it might be helpful to use programs like Rhino in order to add objects that servant might have used to tend to the rooms in the 3-D model of the space. While I will be working with Jacob Schneider, Jordan Sholem and Samina Gagné on this project, I will be working extensively with Samina in particular, for she is focusing in on other bodies in space as well as textiles. It is important to know not only how the users of the room used it, but also what these people might have worn, and how that was influenced by fashion of the day and the increasing globalization.

Placing people and objects back into these rooms will allow for a more realistic vision of their use during the Enlightenment. A viewer could glean so much more from visualizing these rooms with people in them. Perhaps an interesting track to take would be to show the evolution of the rooms in a given day. For example, perhaps a servant came to clean a room for the first time during the day at around 5am, and then at 8am and then before noon, and then right after lunch, etc. This way, viewers could see just how frequently these rooms were tweaked and transformed, and were constantly inhabited by someone. In addition, adding little paragraphs with historical facts on the website, like the fact that in general, servants were on-call whenever their employers needed them to be might help further inform the viewer; the fact that could be asked to perform chores at any hour of the day is an intriguing detail. This way, while audiences can visualize a representation of day-to-day usage of these spaces through the imagery, they also get a more general idea of the role of the servant, which is entirely rooted in fact and historical evidence, through these blurbs.

In addition, I would also like to see if comparisons could be made between the role of females and males in subservient positions in the home, or if this existed at all, by looking at paintings and other artwork we have from this period of European history. I hope to find resources for this work in paintings that were created by European artists, exhibiting servants and enslaved people, around the time of the Enlightenment. These paintings, as well as texts from the time period, will be treated as primary sources. However, it is key to use a variety  of both visual representations and written testimony, as artists, and writers, can sometimes embellish; it is essential to compare and contrast these representations of history to one another.

In addition, I hope to be able to discern differences and find a clear transformation in the role of the servant from the periods before and in the aftermath of the Enlightenment; I would like to pinpoint why these changes might have happened. Using sources from Professor Higonnet and specific images of works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s own collection will help further inform this project. Hopefully from those sources, we will be able to have the most historically accurate information; additional research could be conducted using the databases, which, as students at Columbia University and Barnard College, we have to our advantage online as well as the libraries on-campus. In addition, the Watson Library, one of the Met’s research libraries, also has a fantastic collection of art books and resources; after conducting research over the summer for my department in the Met, I am very familiar with the set-up of the library and would be very interested in looking there for resources.

After looking at the ESDA Catalogue of the Wrightsman Galleries, there are many examples that can be utilized for this particular project. While it might be useful to look to this catalogue for objects and how they interacted in space, there are also some examples specifically of people in those spaces. For example, on page 149, there is a painting entitled, Interior with Card Players by the artist Pierre-Louis Dumesnil the Younger. Another example mentioned in the catalogue is on page 219 of N. Bonnart’s Couple Drinking Chocolate, which shows a couple, with another woman beside them, along with a small servant boy, who appears to be a person of color. The former shows an interior, in a home, with men and women playing a card game. At the same time, in the bottom left-hand corner, there is a servant, who appears to be a black woman, tending to the fireplace. One could discuss so much in the painting with a critical lens, analyzing the placement of the woman as revealing of her dispensability – as she is on the left and on the bottom, both locations that are viewed as inferior in our mind; we prioritize high over low, and favor right over left. It makes sense that the action, the center of attention, the part that’s “most important” is on the right-hand side, fairly centered. Looking at examples like this within the museum’s collection will be extremely helpful and a chance to fully take advantage of our opportunity partnering up with the Met.

As Professor Higonnet mentioned in class, our goal with this project is to finally give those who have been previously silenced a voice that history has generally forgotten or ignored. The idea that those who write the narrative of the past control history rings true, and as a group our job is to help remedy this issue, this gap in scholarship utilizing the fantastic collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that are, too, often neglected in many ways. In this way, the whole project comes full circle: exposing a neglected reality in history using rooms that have been deemed by many to be overlooked or disregarded as archaic or static.