Conference 2026
Unreliable Lives: Rethinking the Artist’s Biography
in the Nineteenth Century
Information
Singer Laren, Laren
12 June, 2026
Tickets: €40,00 / €15,00 (Students) on the Singer Laren website
Unreliable Lives: Rethinking the Artist’s Biography in the Nineteenth Century
How are artists’ biographies constructed, and how do these narratives shape or distort our understanding of their work?
This one-day international conference examines biography not as a stable source of meaning, but as a constructed and sometimes unreliable framework that shapes how artists are understood, judged, and received. Focusing on the long nineteenth century - a period that codified the modern image of the artist and entrenched powerful narratives of genius, identity, and reputation - the programme brings together scholars who probe the limits, uses, and distortions of artist biographies.
Across three thematic sessions, the conference addresses key fault lines in the use of biography. The first considers the challenges of absence and access: what happens when artists’ lives must be reconstructed from fragmentary archives, or when the available sources themselves raise ethical concerns? The second turns to canonical figures, asking how problematic aspects of artists’ lives - whether moral, psychological, or ideological - have shaped, and continue to reshape, their reception. The third examines how nineteenth-century models of artistic identity have been retrospectively imposed on earlier artists, transforming their biographies and, in turn, the interpretation of their work.
A keynote lecture by Julie Codell further interrogates the instability of biographical genres and their interpretive stakes. Together, the papers invite a critical reassessment of nineteenth-century models of artistic biography and their afterlives, asking how they continue to shape art history today.
The programme includes three sessions, a keynote lecture, and a visit to the exhibition Masterpieces from Le Havre: Renoir, Monet, Dufy, Matisse & others. Lunch and drinks are also included.
PROGRAMME
9.30-10.00 Registration, Coffee & Tea
10.00-10.10 Doede Hardeman, Singer Museum Laren: Welcome
10.10-10.25 Charles Kang, Rijksmuseum: Introduction to the Conference Theme
10.25-11.15 Keynote lecture Julie Codell, Arizona State University: “Indispensable Obstacle: Unraveling Biographical Genres”
11.15-11.30 Break
Session 1 – Sense and Absence of Source Material
Session chair: Ulrike Müller, University of Antwerp and Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
11.30-11.50 Claire Dupin de Beyssat, Musée d’Orsay: “Lost in the Crowd? Reconstructing the Biographies of Salons Exhibitors in Nineteenth-Century France through Large-Scale Data and Seriality”
11.50-12.10 Heather Nickels, independent curator and Columbia University: “Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller's Paris Years (1899-1902) & The Value of the ‘Intimate Archive’”
12.10-12.25 Session 1: Questions and Discussion
12.25-12.35 Suzanne Veldink, Singer Museum Laren: Introduction to the exhibition Masterpieces from Le Havre: Renoir, Monet, Dufy, Matisse & others and to the focus presentation on Etha Fles and Medardo Rosso.
Lunch & Exhibition
12.35-14.15 Lunch and visit to the exhibition
Session 2 – Old Masters, New Uses
Session chair: Charles Kang, Rijksmuseum
14.15-14.35 Laura Prins, Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “‘Identify with another person's soul’: Delacroix & the artist’s biography”
14.35-14.55 Michela D’Agostino, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata: “Properzia de’ Rossi Between Mythmaking and Institutional Judgment”
14.55-15.15 Séverine Sofio, Center for Research on Arts and Language, Paris: “Forgotten and Reborn: Fluctuating Memory, Biographical Gaps, and the Re-Semantisation of Artistic Lives”
15.15-15.30 Session 2: Questions and Discussion
Coffee & Tea
15.30-15.50 Coffee & Tea break
Session 3 – Challenging Legacies
Session chair: Nina Reid, Van Gogh Museum and Radboud University
15.50-16.10 Oriane Poret, Université Lyon 2 / LARHRA: “Loving, Using, Killing: Rosa Bonheur and the Biographical Ambivalence of the Animalier”
16.10-16.30 Julia Griffin, independent scholar: “Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Victorian Stigmas of Madness and Adultery, and Suppressed Commemoration by the Rossetti Family (1882–1919)”
16.30-16.45 Session 3: Questions and Discussion
16.45-17.00 Wrap up
17.00-18.00 Drinks and bite