Vue du nœud - Les Rendez-vous numériques en histoire de l'art des Antilles - Episode 6

Le Masurier

Les Rendez-vous numériques en histoire de l'art des Antilles - Episode 6
Published on 6 mai 2024

Portrait de famille accompagné d'une nourrice tenant un enfant dans ses bras (or ‘Choiseul-Meuse et sa famille à la Martinique’), preserved at the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, is the 6th episode in the series of digital appointments in Art History of the West Indies. At the end of the 18th century, the Marquis de Choiseul commissioned painter Marius Pierre Le Masurier to paint three group portraits: one of a slave family, one of a mulatto family [both kept in the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac] and one of his own family, reflecting his desire to show, in 1775, a Martinican Creole society free of tension and under the control of the dominant white elites, while respecting the hierarchy of races. The intimate portrait of the Choiseul family highlights the social success of an aristocratic family in the colonies, living in Parisian style. On the eve of the revolution, these three works, as symbolic as they are political, attempt to create the illusion of the maintenance of intergenerational family ties in the colonies, with their social virtues, through an idealized, compartmentalized vision of Creole plantation society.

• Scénario & Rédaction : Christelle Lozère
• Assistantes : Coline Chillet | Nadine Priam
• Musique générique : MADOO
• Voix off : Cyriaque Sommier
• Images : Hocquet Production | Eye ans Eye Production
• Infographies & Générique : Olivier Hocquet
• Production exécutive : Hocquet production
• Production déléguée : CNRS

Project in collaboration with Dimitri Béchacq (CNRS), Innovation and Research Development correspondent for UMR 8053 at the INSHS of the CNRS.

Prepared by Christelle Lozère