Events & Calendars “Of Monsters and Women: Collecting Japanese Art in 19th-Century Paris”: A Talk by Professor Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University)

The Paris Musée d’Ennery owes its existence to a young woman who, in the 1840s, had an interest in acquiring the Chinese and Japanese “monsters” hidden in antique shops. Fifty years later, Clémence Lecarpentier d’Ennery bequeathed her collection of nearly 7,000 objects to the French state. Although she assembled these pieces and built a house and galleries to curate and display them, museum conservators posthumously erased her life’s work, presenting it instead as her husband’s achievement.

This lavishly illustrated talk will present the museum, its collections and its history before teasing out some of the complicated social factors—among them class, gender, religion and nationalism—that led to the museum’s marginalization as a cultural institution.