ABSTRACT
To illustrate my definition of the dandy, I would like to refer to Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 portrait of Louis XIV, an oil painting on canvas I saw at the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in March 2007. At the time, as a Fulbright grantee doing research at Harvard, I was invited to give talks on three campuses of the University of California. After the talks at UC Davis and Berkeley, UCLA was the last stop. The visit to the museum there was unexpected, but it turned out to be the most rewarding experience in my weeklong trip to the west coast. Louis XIV in the painting manifests perfectly the dandy in my mind, a concept I had been deliberating for years, trying to lay out the principal theoretical frame of this study. How much more can an image say than words!
