Hunting art –from monumental paintings of the royal hunt and animal combat to dog portraits and decorated guns –was one of the most spectacular visual manifestations of political power in early modern France.Of the many modes of hunting art, landscape painting was the most literal in its evocation of the mastery of nature, and of the nation. This talk, taking as its case study Pierre-Denis Martin’s Hunting Party at Bougival (c. 1730),explores the aesthetic and political ambitions of the arts of the hunt, and argues for a new understanding of art, absolutism, and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France.

Amy Freund is an associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her teaching career in the SMU art history department in 2005 as a Haakon Predoctoral Fellow. She subsequently held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Before joining the SMU faculty in 2014, she was an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.

WHEN: Wednesday, February 26, 2020
WHERE: Everson 157, 4:30 pm