Zoomed-in results around the Louvre for the year 1774; screen shot by Veronika Korbei from Hannah Williams and Chris Sparks, Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World, www.artistsinparis.org (accessed 3 April 2018). As noted in the FAQs for the site, “there are 10,915 addresses in the database,” with coverage for “a total of 471 artists,” that is, for “every artist admitted to the Academy between 1675 and 1793.” Useful site details are available with the ‘settings’ tab.
Artists in Paris is an open-access digital art history project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and supported by Queen Mary University of London. The Principal Investigator of the project is Dr Hannah Williams. The website was designed and built by Dr Chris Sparks.
Introduction
Paris is a city renowned for its artistic communities. Neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are familiar spaces of artistic activity and sociability. But when it comes to earlier generations of artists, we know strikingly little about how they inhabited the city.
Where did the artists of eighteenth-century Paris live? Which artists were neighbours? What sub-communities formed within the city? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the eighteenth-century art world? And did that geography change over the course of the century?
This website provides answers to these tantalising questions about the geography and demography of the Paris art world in the eighteenth century. Based on original archival research retrieving the addresses of hundreds of artists’ homes and studios, this website uses digital mapping technologies to locate those spaces on georeferenced historical maps, making them available for visitors to explore.
Significance
Artists in Paris is the first project to map comprehensively where artistic communities developed in the eighteenth-century city and offers rich scope for subsequent investigations into how these communities worked and the impact they had on art practice in the period. Yielding crucial new information and harnessing the exciting possibilities of digital humanities for art-his
torical research, this website is intended as a valuable resource for anyone studying or researching French art, or for anyone with an interest in the history of Paris. Continue to read here
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