ABSTRACT
Drawing on contemporary ideas about the decorative and erudite value of shells, put forth by the art dealer Edme-Francois Gersaint, shell connoisseur Antoine-Joseph d’Argenville, and Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, Brosnan situates the artist Anne Vallayer-Coster’s shell paintings within the context of cabinets of curiosities and the conchological discourse taking place in the eighteenth century. She argues that Vallayer-Coster’s paintings espouse the twin systems of meaning that structured French curiosity cabinets and conchological texts: the aesthetic and the scientific, as well as the visual and the haptic. Brosnan demonstrates that though seemingly diametrically opposed, the aesthetic/scientific and visual/haptic understandings of shells are intricately connected in practice—that is, the artists painting practice and the collecting practices of her patrons. She also points to the dual gendered inflections in the eighteenth century, associated with the primary masculine space of the natural history cabinet, as well as the Rococo decoration of the feminine boudoir. Shells bridged these two gendered, and distinctly dixhuitième spaces, producing overlapping cultural meanings therein.
