Essays
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Oliver Wunsch, “Imagine Watteau,” in Breaking the Silence: Methods of Writing Art History, ed. Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute / Yale University Press, 2025), 240–49.
Artificial intelligence promises to transform the field of art restoration, offering the possibility of reconstructing works long thought lost. In an admittedly unscientific experiment, I use Midjourney to simulate An...
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Oliver Wunsch, “The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France,” Art History 48, no. 1 (February 2025): 14–44.
Audiences in eighteenth-century France felt little compunction about admiring African people in art while denigrating them in life. They reconciled this apparent contradiction through a belief in the ameliorative effe...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Making up Race: Whiteness, Pinkness, and Pompadour,” in Madame de Pompadour: Painted Pink, ed. A. Cassandra Albinson (Harvard Art Museums / Yale University Press, 2022), 74–85.
This essay reinterprets François Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour at her toilette by asking what it meant, in mid-eighteenth-century France, to paint oneself pink. Situating the work within the rise of Atlant...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Discriminating Taste: Skin Color and Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century France,” H-France Salon 15, no. 8 (2022): 1–12.
This essay examines Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s 1741 pastel of a Black man in relation to contemporary debates about skin color, anatomy, and human difference. Rather than treating the work as a straightforward contr...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Rosalba Carriera’s Four Continents and the Commerce of Skin,” Journal18, no. 10 (Fall 2020).
Rosalba Carriera’s approach to the *Four Continents* stands out in the early eighteenth century for its unusual attention to facial complexion, distinguishing the allegorical figures less through symbolic attributes t...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘Black countess’ identified,” The Burlington Magazine 161, no. 1398 (October 2019): 840–845.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1881 painting *The Black Countess* portrays a striking Black woman speeding along the coast of Nice, but for more than a century her identity remained unknown. Archival research presented h...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Watteau, through the Cracks,” The Art Bulletin 100, no. 2 (June 2018): 37–60.
Antoine Watteau’s paintings decayed rapidly. Soon after his death, his contemporaries bemoaned the cracks ravaging his works. They regarded the problem as the product of Watteau’s restless character, noting that his s...
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Oliver Wunsch, “Diderot and the Materiality of Posterity,” Early Modern French Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 63–78.
Art decays over time, so why should artists put faith in posterity? This question became a major source of disagreement in the correspondence between Denis Diderot and the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet. For Falcon...