Hannah Williams, Tangled Lines: Haiti and Paris’s Art Collectors

This talk takes as its starting point an unexpected discovery: property maps of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) that read like a who's who of the Paris art world, revealing scores of absentee plantation owners who were also prominent art collectors. Drawing on research from the collaborative digital project, Colonial Networks: Remapping the ‘Paris’ Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue, Hannah Williams traces one particularly revealing set of tangled lines – those connecting the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue to some of the most celebrated collections in the history of French art, many of whose treasured objects now reside in public museums around the world, from the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A central figure among these tangled lines is Jean-Joseph de Laborde: banker to Louis XV and Louis XVI, one of France's wealthiest financiers, slave trader, and owner of three sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue. On the profits of enslaved labour, Laborde built an extraordinary art collection and transformed his Château de Méréville into a showcase of contemporary French culture, commissioning major works from painters and sculptors including Vernet, Pajou, and Vigée-Le Brun. His story illuminates the deep colonial entanglements that underwrote elite Parisian taste in the eighteenth century.

Laborde was guillotined in 1794, but this story does not stop with the French and Haitian Revolutions. Laborde left behind a web of alliances – financial, familial, and political – that his heirs navigated with considerable success across the post-Revolutionary decades. The tangled lines traced through this talk extend well into the nineteenth century: when France imposed its notorious 1825 indemnity, forcing Haiti to pay reparations to secure its independence, Laborde’s children were among those who collected. The Laborde family remained central to French cultural life: Léon de Laborde (Jean-Joseph’s grandson) would become curator at the Louvre in 1847.

Tracing the lives and afterlives of Laborde's art, his properties and his colonial profits, this talk asks how we might remap the story of the Paris art world – and what solidarities, silences and injustices that remapping reveals.

Hannah Williams is Reader in the History of Art at Queen Mary University of London. She specialises in the visual and material culture of France (1650-1850), with a particular focus on the social, urban, religious, and colonial dimensions of the Paris art world. She is the author of two books that investigate the lives of Parisian artists: Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (2015), winner of the Prix Mariane Roland Michel, and Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France (2024), co-authored with Katie Scott and shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize.

Hannah has written widely on French art and history and is also known for her work in digital art history, including mapping projects that reconstruct the cultural geographies of the Paris art world, both locally (www.artistsinparis.org) and globally (www.colonialnetworks.org). She is co-director, with Meredith Martin, of a collaborative multimedia project entitled Colonial Networks: Remapping the ‘Paris’ Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue. Hannah is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a founding editor of Journal18.

This event is supported by the Cassal Endowment Fund.

Image: René Phelipeau, Detail from Plan de la plaine du fond de l’Isle à Vache de l’Isle St Domingue, 1786 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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University of London Institute in Paris - Lecture Theatre, 9 -11 Rue de Constantine, Paris, France

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