James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959) was a collector, Harvard alumnus, and expatriate in Paris between the two World Wars. He assembled an unusual collection, one focusing on iconography, with artworks spanning from Antiquity to the late nineteenth century, all representing personifications of the Four Continents in the arts in different media (paintings, sculptures, prints, tapestries, decorative arts and furnishings). For this occasion, Louise Arizzoli will explore James H. Hyde’s multi-faceted relationship with France, which started in the opulent society of Gilded Age New York and then continued when he moved to Paris in 1906.
In the Parisian Belle Époque, Hyde surrounded himself with a solid social network made of archeologists and art historians but also museum curators, agents, and art dealers. For example, I explore his friendship with relevant figures of French intellectual circles, such as the archeologist, Salomon Reinach, art historian Emile Mâle, and Pierre de Nolhac, curator at the Palace of Versailles. I also aim to visualize Hyde’s art market network in Paris during the interwar period, and discuss his relationship and missed bequest to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. I finally will take a moment to examine the use of photography in Hyde’s collecting practices; his Four Continents photographic archive being both an extension of his collection and a reflection of art markets’ networks.
Louise Arizzoli is an Instructional Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Indiana University in 2013, with a specialization in the history of collections in France and in United States, as well as in Renaissance and Baroque European Art. Prior to joining the University of Mississippi in the Spring 2013, she was Acting Curator for Western Art before 1800 at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. She has received several fellowships and grants among which a Junior Fellowship at the Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting in America in New York. She has co-edited a book titled Bodies and Map: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents (Brill 2021) and is editing a second volume on Continent Personification and its controversies: Controversial Monuments: Continent Personifications from the 18th to the 21st century (Brill, 2023). She is currently working on a monograph on James Hazen Hyde and his Four Continents collection: Collecting the Four Continents: James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), an American in Paris.
Organised by the The French Chapter of The Society for the History of Collecting
Friday 2 Dec 2022 at 5.30pm (GMT); 6.30pm (CET)
Via Zoom
Registration: thesocietyforthehistoryofcollecting.wildapricot.org/event-5048183.
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