Associate Professor of Art History and ZSR Foundation Faculty Fellow, Wake Forest University

“Translating India: Mughal Art and French Knowledge Production in the Late Eighteenth Century”

The eighteenth century was a period of heightened contact between India and France, resulting in the circulation of images and ideas between the courts of the Mughals and that of Versailles. A set of objects from the collection of Jean-Baptiste Gentil, a French East India Company officer who lived in the subcontinent for 25 years, embodied these exchanges. In this talk, I explore how Gentil collaborated with Indian artists and translators to produce albums that mediated between the traditions of Mughal manuscript painting and the audiences of eighteenth-century Paris, ultimately revealing the impact of Mughal manuscript culture on eighteenth-century French knowledge production.