Professor of eighteenth and nineteenth century European art Melissa Hyde and her research on French Rococo painting are featured in the Voltaire Foundation’s latest publication from the Oxford University Studies in Enlightenment series, Rococo echo: art, history and historiography from Cochin to Coppola. The book, which is edited by Hyde and Katie Scott, a leading expert on Rococo decorative arts, is a study of the afterlives of the Rococo from Western Europe to the US to Brazil, from the eighteenth century to the present.
“Rococo Echo brings together a collection of new essays about the Rococo’s persistence across the later eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” says Hyde. “It offers a resource for those working not only in the field of eighteenth century studies but those concerned more generally with questions of cultural revival, memory and play.”
Though Hyde and Scott have been friends and colleagues for many years, this is their first edited work together. “Our work on this project entailed countless emails and skype calls to strategize about the framing of the project,” says Hyde. “We both read and edited all of the essays.
It was a labor of love.”
Hyde is currently co-authoring a book on women artists in eighteenth and nineteenth century France with Mary D. Sheriff. They are also curating an exhibition of French drawings from a private collection entitled Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment, which will open at the Harn Museum of Art in fall 2017 before traveling to other venues in the U.S.
