Topic: Portraiture from Gericault's Insane to Rodin's Balzac
Novatory conceptions in the genre of portraiture coincide with adiscursive intensification
of the self in the latter half of the eighteenth century, especially as a result of the political and
cultural impact of the American and French Revolutions.  Not the Revolutions per se but their
abstract ideals and goals which did much to create the modern sense of the self.  They proposed
to free human beings from the authority of, or allotted station within the church and state, and this
unfettering was intended to allow the individual to define herself or himself by making choices.
This shift, this leveling of ancien regime societal structure, where a self in the most incisive of
terms was sought after rather than given, had momentous consequences, along with poetic
and critical notions of sympathy, on the genre of portraiture, especially in France in the nineteenth
century.
Upon building a sound base of portraiture criticism and theory, the following larger themes
will be explored:  The Romantic Image of the Divine Napoleon, The Mirror and the Lamp in
Ingres and Degas, The Modern Language of the Psychological Portrait, Portraiture with Realistic
Means and Symbolic Ends, Cultural Critique via Caricature, Representions of the French
Writer/Intellectual, Women Portraying Women, and Effacing the Self from Monet to Cezanne and
Picabia.