Journal Article

The individual's triumph: the eighteenth-century consolidation of authorship and art historiography

Pullins, David

2017

Overview

The eighteenth-century consolidation of authorship - apparent in Salon livrets, art criticism, sales catalogues, inventories, the theoretical development of maniera, signing and hanging practices - was crucial to subsequent, nineteenth-century Romantic notions of what constituted individual authorship and to the kinds of eighteenth-century painting that were eventually written into or out of art history. But these developments did not take place unilaterally or overnight. Some of the period's leading painters partook in practices directly contrary to them, most notably through the practice of multiple hands on a single canvas, typically divided according to genre specialization in a longstanding and practical distribution of labour associated with workshop production. The eighteenth-century saw a shift in this longstanding type of painting, however, towards 'collaborations' not between contemporaries in the same city, but between contrasting schools or periods that played on an appreciation of pastiche. Paradoxically, this relied on an understanding of the consolidated author and the connoisseur's ability to differentiate between distinct hands. This article sets out what the shifting terrain of authorship in eighteenth-century France might tell us about much more recent developments in academic discourse around the figure of the author.

• Publisher: Journal of Art Historiography,Department of Art History, University of Birmingham
• Subject: 18th century / art historiography / Art history / Authorship / connoisseurship / Copyright / Culture / Eighteenth-century drawings / Eighteenth-century paintings / Historiography / multi-authored Works / Museums / Oil painting / Painters / provenance research