Colonial Networks: Remapping the “Paris” Art World in a 1786 Map of Saint Domingue

This talk focuses on a 1786 property map of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) dedicated to the comte de Vaudreuil, a prominent Paris-based courtier and art collector whose father had governed the colony. The map records the parceling of land around Cap Français, the so-called “Paris of the Antilles,” where several of the oldest, most lucrative sugar plantations were located. Instead of place names, the map is inscribed with surnames, each belonging to a plantation owner. When we, specialists of eighteenth-century French art, first came across this map, we were startled to see that its names read like a “who’s who” of the Paris art world: although aware of some of these connections, the map had a powerful, visceral impact unlike any document we had come across. Furthermore, the deeper histories of the links it visualizes between colonial commerce and art world activities are largely unknown. 

Meredith Martin is Professor of Art History at New York University and the Institute of Fine Arts and a founding editor of Journal18. A specialist in early modern French art and empire, she is the co-author (with Gillian Weiss) of the award-winning book The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty, 2022). Martin is also the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard, 2011), and a co-author of Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (2020), which is related to an exhibition she co-curated for The New York Public Library. Together with the choreographer Phil Chan, Martin reimagined and restaged a lost 1739 French ballet known as the Ballet des Porcelaines that was performed throughout the U.S. and Europe in 2021-22.

Hannah Williams is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at Queen Mary University of London. A specialist in French art and history of the long eighteenth century, she is co-author (with Katie Scott) of Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France (Getty, 2024); author of Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Routledge, 2015), winner of the Prix Marianne Roland Michel; and is currently writing a book on Art and Religion in Enlightenment Paris. Williams is also director of the digital mapping project Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18^th-Century Art World, awarded the BSECS Digital Prize in 2020, and a founding co-editor of Journal18.