Matters of Life and Art: Art and French Materialism in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This dissertation explores how artists in the second half of the eighteenth century engaged with the intellectual movement contemporaries named materialism. French materialism is best understood as a period of concentrated questioning about the relationship between matter and life, based on the premise that matter itself contains a vital force and the power to self-organize. I argue that materialist assertions of matter’s agency encouraged the artists Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Carême de Fécamp (c.1709-c.1786), Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734-1781) to consider anew the material aspects of the artistic process and integrate a heightened awareness of their media into their work. Simultaneously, I argue that materialism altered artists’ understanding of their subjects. In some cases, the artists in this dissertation represented objects that had been unmoored by materialism’s fluidity and now floated between human and non-human, or animal and plant. In others, they represented landscapes reshaped by materialist theories of nature’s generative prowess, hypotheses about life’s origins, and accounts of the physical transformations the environment produces in the human body. Drawing on a range of primary sources and archival discoveries, this dissertation examines how each of the four artists above innovatively employed a specific medium—oil paint, ink and wash, pastel, and aquatint—to explore and confront questions that materialism raised. It thereby demonstrates how artistic practices began to embody scientific and philosophical theories and helped imagine certain consequences of materialism’s radical investigation of matter.