Epistemic Drawing: Madeleine Basseporte at the Jardin du roi

Employed as the "king's painter" at the royal botanical garden in Paris for almost half a century, Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701-1780) produced drawings of plants for the exclusive collection known as the vélins du Roi (the royal vellums). Looking closely at a selection of sheets from this corpus, the lecture examines the distinctive character of Basseporte's work and its broader epistemic and institutional implications. Attending to the knowledge-making dimension of her images, it considers the artist's role in the production of botanical savoir: how did Basseporte's representational strategies and technical procedures contribute to the vision of the plant world offered in her vellums? What was the role of the Jardin du roi as the primary locus of her artistic activity? Both a physical space and a discursive arena, the Jardin was shaped by emergent natural science and by the global network of exchanges linked to trade and colonial conquest. In what ways was the artist's depiction of plants implicated in this simultaneously local and global context? And what might attention to her practice at the Jardin contribute to our understanding of the professional lives of female artists in early modernity?

This talk is free and open to the public.