Remapping the “Paris” Art World in Haiti/Saint-Domingue
Amanda Maffei (Università degli Studi di Milano and Institut Catholique de Paris) Maps and other images associated with the family of Jean-Charles and Marc-René de Montalembert offer an unusually clear window onto the visual culture that connected Enlightenment Paris and colonial Saint-Domingue in the final decades of the eighteenth century.[1] At once noble, technical, and …
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Victoria Dickenson (McGill Library and Collections) On 19 February 1766, a French engineer who had lived almost half his life in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) sat down to paint a moth. This would not have been a remarkable event, if it had not heralded the beginning of a project of natural …
Continue reading “René de Rabié, the Hunter, and the Ti Plonjon”
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Meredith Martin (NYU) and Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London) Throughout 2025, we have had the honor and pleasure of working with the Haitian-born international digital and video artist, Maksaens Denis. Maksaens generously agreed to work with us to produce an animation and digital collage which will feature as the introduction and framing design …
Continue reading “Counter-Mapping Haitian History: An Artist’s Interview with Maksaens Denis”
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Arielle Xena Alterwaite (Brown University) On June 26, 1826, the French merchant vessel L’Hébé left Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Captained by Mr. Forsans, it contained the purported monetary value of one million Haitian gourdes in coins, carried in 20 chests, each filled with five numbered boxes, totaling 100 boxes.[1] One of these chests (Fig. 1) survives in …
Continue reading “The Many Monies of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity”
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Julia I. Doe (Columbia University) Louis Julien Clarchies was a violinist, composer, and director of dance orchestras who achieved transatlantic fame in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[1] Clarchies was born into slavery in Dutch colonial Curaçao, and first rose to prominence on the public stages of Saint-Domingue. Manumitted on the eve of the …
Continue reading “Louis Julien Clarchies, c. 1767–1815: A Transatlantic Musical Legacy”
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Meredith Martin (NYU) and Hannah Williams (QMUL) We are excited to announce the launch of Slaves in Paris: A Digital Mapping Project, a collaboration between historian Miranda Spieler and Colonial Networks. This new website aims to uncover and visualize the drastically overlooked histories of enslaved people within the heart of France’s capital in the eighteenth-century. …
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Oliver Wunsch (Boston College) In a pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, an array of colors define the face of the French plantation owner Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau (1709–1787) (Fig. 1). A shadow of bluish grays and earthen browns creeps across his right side. On the left, yellow striations give his jaw a warm glow. Touches of pink …
Continue reading “Fleuriau’s Skin”
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Esther Chadwick (Courtauld Institute of Art) On November 18, 1816, King Henry Christophe (1767-1820) wrote from his palace in the postrevolutionary Kingdom of Hayti to Thomas Clarkson, the British abolitionist, to announce the presence of a new art school: “Mr. Evans, the teacher of drawing and painting, is established at Sans Souci, and his school …
Continue reading “The Academy of Drawing and Painting at Sans-Souci, 1816-17”
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Sophia Kitlinksi (Yale University) In the final years of King Henry Christophe’s reign over northern Haiti (r. 1811–20), a Black man arrived at Christophe’s royal court in the opulent palace of Sans-Souci. He sought artistic instruction under British painter Richard Evans at the recently established Academy of Painting and Drawing. To reach the Academy, the …
Continue reading “Drawing the Legacy of Henry Christophe”
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Meredith Martin (New York University) In 1786, an enslaved man called Jean-François escaped from the Lilavois plantation, where this marker is located (Fig. 1). A reward was offered for his capture in the Saint-Domingue newspaper Affiches américaines, which regularly published advertisements for enslaved “runaways” (maroons). From this ad we learn, among other things, that Jean-François …
Continue reading “Wigs and Enslaved Wigmakers”
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