Tisdagsföreläsning: Professor Mary D. Sheriff

22.5 Lokal: D7

Professor Mary D. Sheriff: Embarking for Cythera, Arriving in the Islands: Watteau and the Fate of Women

The talk will interpret Watteau's famous Pilgrimage to Cythera 1717 in relation to his work called The Departure for the Islands. Known only through an engraving, The Departure has received little or no attention; it represents the forced deportation of women to Louisiana as punishment for "loose morals." Deportations of both women and men were common and highly unpopular during the French Regency. While seduction seems to give pleasure in the Pilgrimage and other fêtes galantes, it is woman's susceptibility to gallantry and seduction that in The Departure brings punishment rather than pleasure. The Departure presents male gallantry in an ironic mode, and such representation both makes more pointed Watteau's critique of these deportations and arouses sympathy for its unfortunate victims.

Mary D. Sheriff is W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor and chair of the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her many books include The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art and Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France.

Her research focuses on 18th-and 19th-century French art and culture, and she is especially interested in issues of creativity, sexuality, gender, and, more recently, travel and cultural exchange.

Read Professor Mary D. Sheriffs own presentation here:   Presentation: Professor Mary D. Sheriff (.doc) (23 Kb)