Detroit Institute of Arts – European Paintings Council Lecture 2026
Provenance Stories: Colonial Networks and the Paris Art World
In this talk, Professors Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams explore different aspects of a multimedia research project that is devoted to uncovering the deep, mostly unknown colonial connections that underlie some of France’s most celebrated art collections. Their project originated in an unexpected discovery: eighteenth-century 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 mostly absentee plantation owners who were also prominent art collectors, patrons, and artists. Through extensive archival and provenance research, Martin and Williams have traced numerous art collections that were built on the profits on enslaved labor, dispersed during the French and Haitian Revolutions (c. 1789–1804), and reside now in public museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wallace Collection, the Louvre, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Event link: https://dia.org/events/provenance-stories-colonial-networks-and-paris-art-world