Rococo and Neoclassical Art in France and Its Caribbean Colonies, 1748 – 1815

Catalog description

This course examines the development of Neoclassicism (concomitantly, for a time, with the Rococo) with a particular emphasis on how art both serves as a fashionable style and also elaborates social ideologies, in France and its Caribbean colonies. New and evolving identities (with regard to politics, class, race, gender, and sexuality) emerge in the conflict between France’s luxurious but decadent aristocracy and progressive Enlightenment ideals that exploded in cataclysmic revolutions in France and Haiti and in the meteoric rise and fall of Napoleon.