THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CLOCKS IN FRENCH PORTRAITS FROM BOUCHER TO DAVID

by Philippe Bordes

Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Lyon; Advisor for  the Arts, Ministry of Higher Education and Research, Paris

Philippe Bordes, with degrees from Stanford University, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Sorbonne, was founding director of the Musée de la Révolution Française in Vizille, near Grenoble, from 1984 to 1996. He has taught in several universities : Montpellier, UCLA, University College London and Paris-Nanterre. From 2001 until his emeritus in 2016 he was professor of art history at the University of Lyon 2. His many publications are principally devoted to late 18th and early 19th century art. He was guest curator for two exhibitions in the United States : Cooper Penrose by Jacques-Louis David (2003, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego) and Jacques-Louis David : Empire to Exile (2005, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Clark Art Institute, Williamstown). During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.) and Director of Studies and Research at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris from 2007 to 2010. He published Représenter la Révolution. Les Dix-Août de Jacques Bertaux et de François Gérard in 2010 and with Pascal Bertrand, edited a collection of essays, Portraiture and Tapestry, in 2015. His current research interests extend to the art of the Renaissance in Lyon, the genre of portraiture and the rococo.