Lecture: Ray Schrire and Dror Wahrman

A Woman Doing her Accounts: Some Lessons from a Peripatetic Early-Modern Image

Ray Schrire (Tel Aviv University) and Dror Wahrman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin)

In 1745, the Swedish princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia commissioned a pair of paintings from the French artist Jean Siméon Chardin. His response set off an extraordinary chain of reproduction, repurposing, and reinterpretation centered on a subtly ambiguous image of a lady engaged in bookkeeping. Our talk, based on a work-in-progress joint book project, traces this image as it traveled across five countries and transformed through various media—from oil painting to copperplate engraving, mezzotint print, and porcelain figurine. In a trans-European game of Chinese whispers, each iteration introduced new contexts and adapted to different technical constraints, imbuing the image with evolving meanings: meanings that centered on the activity of writing and on books as objects. This journey offers a lens through which to explore women’s education, numeracy, book culture, and global trade, while also shedding fresh light on the enduring tension between original and copy and the extent of shared cultural coherence in eighteenth-century Europe.