Call for Papers: “My Strength, My Comfort, My Intense Delight”: Women, Art and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
The goal is to unearth and draw attention to now-obscure autobiographies published by women artists in the 18th and 19th centuries—especially accounts from outside normative “Western” narratives.
The panel will be at the conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada, at the University of Toronto this October 27-29. Full panel description is below. Deadline is June 30. Per standard practice, you need to join UAAC if your paper is accepted – but *not* to submit a proposal. Conference details/application form here: https://uaac-aauc.com/2022/.
“My Strength, My Comfort, My Intense Delight”: Women, Art and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the “West” in the early 1800s for the “Orient,” recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s two decades in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative “Western” narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.
