Meredith Martin

Ph.D. 2006, M.A. 2003, Harvard University; B.A. 1997, Princeton University

18th- and 19th-Century French and British art, architecture, and material culture; histories of empire, colonialism, and enslavement; art and gender politics; cross-cultural encounters; interiors and identity; historical revivalism and contemporary art. Dr. Martin is a founding editor of Journal18 (www.journal18.org) and the co-creator and producer of the Ballet des Porcelaines, a reimagined version of a lost 18th-C. French ballet that toured the U.S. and Europe in 2021-22. She is currently working on a project that explores links between late 18th-C. Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the Paris art world, and has co-written and produced a film with the National Gallery in London related to this research.

Select Publications:

Books and Edited Volumes:

The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France (co-authored with Gillian Weiss) (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2022)

Le Roi-Soleil en mer. Art maritime et galériens dans la France de Louis XIV, trans. Élise Trogrlic (French edition of The Sun King at Sea) (Paris: Les Éditions de l’EHESS, 2022).

Reimagining the Ballet des Porcelaines: A Tale of Magic, Desire, and Exotic Entanglement, ed. Meredith Martin, with contributions by Phil Chan and Charlotte Vignon (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2022)

Meltdown: Picturing the World's First Bubble Economy (co-authored with Nina Dubin and Madeleine Viljoen) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols-Harvey Miller Publishers, 2020)

Meltdown accompanies an exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled Fortune and Folly in 1720 curated by Martin, Dubin and Viljoen

Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2011)

Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World, co-edited with Daniela Bleichmar, special issue of Art History, vol. 38, no. 4 (September 2015)

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, co-edited with Denise Baxter (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010)

Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Scott Rothkopf (London: Serpentine Gallery/Koenig Books, 2007)

Articles:

"De New York à Nantes, le musée face à l'esclavage," Entre-temps, February 2023

“Ixion’s Wheel, or The Four Elements: Drawing Order from Chaos in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, exh. cat., Clark Art Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2022

“Mediterranean Migrations to the French Atlantic” (with Gillian Weiss), in “The Age of Slavery,” special issue of The Age of Revolutions (July 2022)

“Porcelain Rooms,” in Early Modern Court Culture, ed. Erin Griffey (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 344-57

“Marie-Antoinette et la mise en scène de la virtue antique,” in Vivre à l’antique, exh. cat. (Réunion des musées nationaux/Éditions Monelle Hayot, 2021), 125-34

“Enslaved Muslims at the Sun King’s Court” (co-authored with Gillian Weiss), in The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domain, ed. Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

“Swiss Porcelain and Slavery in the Global Eighteenth Century,” in Une Suisse exotique? - Regarder l'ailleurs en Suisse au siècles des Lumières, ed. Noémie Etienne et al. (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2020)

“Monstruous Assemblage: Ribart’s Elephant Monument to Louis XV,” Journal18, Spring 2019. View Article >

“A Tale of Two Guns: Mediterranean Servitude and Maritime Weaponry in Louis XIV’s France” (co-authored with Gillian Weiss), in The Art of Travel: The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Elisabeth Fraser (Routledge, 2019), 27-48

“History Repeats Itself in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 99, no. 1 (March 2017), 97-127

“Staging China, Japan and Siam at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition,” in Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (c. 1795-1911), ed. Petra Chu and Jennifer Milam (Brill), forthcoming in 2018

“Ambassades extraordinaires et visiteurs des contrées lointaines,” in Visiteurs de Versailles: Voyageurs, Princes, Ambassadeurs, 1682-1789, ed. Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (exh. cat., Château de Versailles and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), 138-149 (English edition to appear in 2018)  

“Early Modern Incense Boats: Commerce, Christianity, and Cultural Exchange” (co-authored with Jeffrey L. Collins), in The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 513-536

“Chapter 13: Interiors and Patronage,” in Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume II: Eighteenth-Century Architecture, ed. Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong (Chichester, West Sussex UK; Malden, Ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 421-443

 “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship,” in Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World, ed. Meredith Martin and Daniela Bleichmar, special issue of Art History, vol. 38, no. 4 (September 2015), pp. 652-67

 “Introduction” to Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (co-authored with Daniela Bleichmar), special issue of Art History, vol. 38, no. 4 (September 2015), pp. 604-19

“Porcelain Rooms,” in Arlene Shechet: All at Once (ICA Boston and Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2015), pp. 165-68

“Tipu Sultan’s Ambassadors at Saint-Cloud: Indomania and Anglophobia in Pre-Revolutionary Paris,” in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 37-68

“’Turks’ on Display During the Reign of Louis XIV,” co-authored with Gillian Weiss, L’Ésprit Créateur, vol. 55, no. 4 (December 2013)

“Remembrance of Things Past: Robert de Montesquiou, Emile Gallé, and Rococo Revival During the Fin-de-Siècle,” forthcoming in Rococo Echo: Art, Theory, and Historiography, themed issue of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Melissa Hyde and Katie Scott (expected 2015)

“Bourbon Renewal at Rambouillet,” in Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660- 1830, themed issue of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012)

“Dairy Cases: The Milk Cure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Cabinet, vol. 40 (Winter 2010/11): 47-53

“The Ascendancy of the Interior in Eighteenth-Century French Architectural Theory,” in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Baxter and Martin (2010), pp. 15-34

Reviews:

“Sous les tapisseries, l’esclavage,” La Vie des idées (December 7, 2021); revised version published in Artforum (Sept. 2021) as “Loose Threads: Meredith Martin on the Nouvelles Indes Tapestries”

“Left Bank/Right Bank: Two Views of the ‘Indies’ in Paris,” Journal18 (Fall 2021)

“On the Margins: Meredith Martin on Jean-Jacques Lequeu,” Artforum (February 2020), 50-51

“Amassed Ornaments: Meredith Martin on Contemporary Art at Versailles,” Artforum, vol. 49 (March 2011): 49-50

Review of Robert Berger and Thomas Hedin’s Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and Laurence Chatel de Brancion’s Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment (Santa Monica: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), The Art Bulletin, vol. 91 (December 2009): 511-515

“Gilty Pleasures: Meredith Martin on the Rococo,” Artforum, vol. 46 (Summer 2008): 189-192 

Courses:

Art and Money in the Early Modern World

Approaching Art History

Architectural Space and Decoration in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chinoiserie in European Art and Performance

Neoclassicism to Realism

French Art from Versailles to the Age of Rococo