Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Deirdre Coleman

Automaton clock representing François-Dominique Toussaint (L’Ouverture). Melbourne, Johnston Collection.

Deirdre Coleman, ‘Touissant Louverture in the Johnston House Museum’

The Haitian revolution was the only successful slave revolution in history, transforming the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent republic of Haiti. To what extent can we see the Johnston House Museum’s automaton clock and other ‘portraits’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the West’s disavowal of the Haitian revolution’s political goals of racial equality and racial liberation?

New Books | Portraits in Revolutionary France & A Portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo restored

Amy Freund, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-271-06194-8.

A new book by Amy Freund, Assistant Professor of Art at Texas Christian University, explores the political and cultural role of the portrait in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.