Tuesday 19 April – Hannah Williams – Mapping Paris: Artists and their Neighbourhoods in the 18th Century

Venue: John S Cohen Room 203, 2nd floor, IHR, North block, Senate House

Abstract

Paris is a city renowned for its artistic communities. Images spring to mind of neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the 19th and 20th centuries, but strikingly little is known about what came before. How did artists inhabit the ‘city of art’ in the early modern period? Through a digital mapping project, it is my intention to explore the much longer and less familiar history of artistic communities in Paris. By tracing the locations of artists’ homes and studios back through the 18th century, this project, and the digital resource being produced, has the potential to shed new light on issues of artistic sociability, the role of the city in art production, and urban experience more generally. In this paper I will discuss the stages of this on-going research project, present preliminary findings, and consider some of the challenges of digital history for non-technologists.

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