Lacey Baradel
Lacey Baradel is a historian of American art from the colonial period through the twentieth century. Her recent book, "Mobility and Identity in U.S. Genre Painting: Painting at the Threshold" (Routledge, 2021), examines how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during the second half of the long nineteenth century informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), Enoch Wood (1831-1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895), and John Sloan (1824-1951). The book aims to complicate art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place, by instead privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. Lacey's research has been generously supported by the University of Pennsylvania, the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010-11), the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art (2012-13), the Baird Society Residential Fellowship at Smithsonian Institution Special Collections (2013), and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2014-15). In 2016, she received the Emerging Scholars Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Lacey has taught introductory courses in art history and visual studies as well as more specialized courses in American art and 20th-century art at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, and the University of Washington. From 2016-17, she was Postdoctoral Research Associate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, architecture, and landscape design in America and Britain at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Her current research project examines the intersections of discourses of art and science in nineteenth-century astronomical imagery, using E. L. Trouvelot's 'Astronomical Drawings Manual' (1882) as a case study. Lacey serves as a Science Historian at the National Science Foundation and is on detail to the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery for a three-year term.
Supervisors: Michael Leja
Supervisors: Michael Leja
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Books by Lacey Baradel
Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.
Publications by Lacey Baradel
Seattle Art Museum, February 15–May 13, 2018
caareviews.org
Drawing on reception collected in the Thomas Hovenden Scrapbook at the Archives of American Art, this essay reexamines the popularity of 'Breaking Home Ties,' especially at the 1893 world’s fair, by analyzing how period discourses about space and progress informed viewers’ reactions to the painting’s subject and composition, often prompting strong emotional connections with the work.
Invited Talks & Lectures by Lacey Baradel
Conference Papers by Lacey Baradel
Panel: "Imag(in)ing Space: Fidelity and Artistic License in Pursuit of the Heavens"
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s portfolio of fifteen large-scale chromolithographic prints, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons to accompany Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings Manual (1882), were among the most influential and innovative images of astronomical phenomena produced at the end of the nineteenth century. The works effectively blurred the boundaries between art and science, receiving accolades from both professional artistic and scientific communities as well as attracting a wide public audience. Trouvelot, a French-born, Boston-based artist and amateur-turned-professional scientist, based the prints on sketches of cosmic forms that he made over the course of nearly two decades using high-powered telescopes at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. According to the artist, the 1882 portfolio aimed to present such forms with “scrupulous fidelity and accuracy,” while also conveying to the viewer something of “the majestic beauty and radiance of celestial objects.” Produced during a period in which photography was quickly becoming the dominant medium for astronomical imagery, Trouvelot argued forcefully against the popular assumption that photographic views of celestial phenomena were more objective or of greater scientific value than his graphic—and often quite abstract—representations. Using Trouvelot’s work as a case study, this paper examines the roles that artistic imagination and invention played in shaping scientific knowledge during the late nineteenth century and investigates the limitations that artistic media and technologies of vision imposed on such processes.
Panel: "Roving Painters in America"
Panel: "Celestial Views"
Panel: "Intimate Geographies"
Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.
Seattle Art Museum, February 15–May 13, 2018
caareviews.org
Drawing on reception collected in the Thomas Hovenden Scrapbook at the Archives of American Art, this essay reexamines the popularity of 'Breaking Home Ties,' especially at the 1893 world’s fair, by analyzing how period discourses about space and progress informed viewers’ reactions to the painting’s subject and composition, often prompting strong emotional connections with the work.
Panel: "Imag(in)ing Space: Fidelity and Artistic License in Pursuit of the Heavens"
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s portfolio of fifteen large-scale chromolithographic prints, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons to accompany Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings Manual (1882), were among the most influential and innovative images of astronomical phenomena produced at the end of the nineteenth century. The works effectively blurred the boundaries between art and science, receiving accolades from both professional artistic and scientific communities as well as attracting a wide public audience. Trouvelot, a French-born, Boston-based artist and amateur-turned-professional scientist, based the prints on sketches of cosmic forms that he made over the course of nearly two decades using high-powered telescopes at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. According to the artist, the 1882 portfolio aimed to present such forms with “scrupulous fidelity and accuracy,” while also conveying to the viewer something of “the majestic beauty and radiance of celestial objects.” Produced during a period in which photography was quickly becoming the dominant medium for astronomical imagery, Trouvelot argued forcefully against the popular assumption that photographic views of celestial phenomena were more objective or of greater scientific value than his graphic—and often quite abstract—representations. Using Trouvelot’s work as a case study, this paper examines the roles that artistic imagination and invention played in shaping scientific knowledge during the late nineteenth century and investigates the limitations that artistic media and technologies of vision imposed on such processes.
Panel: "Roving Painters in America"
Panel: "Celestial Views"
Panel: "Intimate Geographies"