Video Highlights

Opening Lecture for Shadow Visionaries: French Artists Against the Current, 1840-70 (42 Minutes)

Exhibition curator Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, introduces Shadow Visionaries: French Artists Against the Current, 1840–70. Offering a new take on mid-nineteenth-century French art, the exhibition emphasizes the powerful role of fantasy and the imagination during an era when Realism was presumed to be ascendant.

Exiled on the Earth: Nature, Technology, and Risk (69 Minutes)

Richard Taws, professor and head of the History of Art Department at University College London, presents a talk in conjunction with the Shadow Visionaries exhibition. Taws examines how representations of infrastructure, nature, and technology shaped the cultural imaginaries of nineteenth-century urban modernity, and how they intersected with contemporary ideas about time and history in France. Focusing on artists featured in Shadow Visionaries, including Charles Meryon, Victor Hugo, and Nadar, the talk explores tensions between organic life and mechanical form, visibility and invisibility, and tradition and transformation, in Paris and further afield. 

Richard Taws specializes in European visual cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He taught previously at McGill University, Canada, and has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize; in 2018, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and in 2022, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. In addition, Taws is the author of Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025) and The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (with Iris Moon; Bloomsbury, 2021) and Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (with Genevieve Warwick; Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).