UAB Professor Pens Book, "The Modern Portrait in 19th Century France"

University of Alabama at Birmingham Art History Professor Heather McPherson, Ph.D., has announced the release of her book, “The Modern Portrait in 19th Century France,” published by Cambridge University Press.

Posted on March 12, 2001 at 1:50 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — University of Alabama at Birmingham Art History Professor Heather McPherson, Ph.D., has announced the release of her book, “The Modern Portrait in 19th Century France,” published by Cambridge University Press.

The book explores the evolution of French portraiture after the advent of photography through six case studies of French artists, ranging from Sarah Bernhardt to Paul Cézanne, whose work, Self-Portrait with Palette is featured on the cover of the book. More than 100 illustrations are featured in the book.

McPherson focuses on portraiture in the latter half of the 19th century, when the genre was threatened with obsolescence by the photographic image. McPherson also relates the diverse strategies artists used to revitalize the portrait.

“I have long had a special interest in portraiture as a mode of visual representation because of its dual function as historical record and transformative fiction,” McPherson said. “As Baudelaire observed in his 1846 Salon, ‘There are two ways of understanding portraiture — either as history or as fiction.’”

The book is the culmination of more then seven years of writing and research, much of it done in Paris. The idea for the book originated with the exhibition, “Fin-de-Siècle Faces: Portraiture in the Age of Proust,” which was organized by McPherson in late 1988 for the Proust Symposium at UAB. McPherson began researching Sarah Bernhardt during the NEH Summer Seminar on Portraiture and Biography, which she participated in at Harvard University in 1990.

McPherson came to UAB in 1982 and is also the director of graduate studies in art history. She received her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. She earned her Master’s degree from the Université de Paris/Sorbonne in France.

McPherson has published widely on French art and visual culture in journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, History of Photography, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Nineteenth-Century Studies. She has also authored exhibition catalogues on “Gavarni’s Images of Women,” “Portraiture in the Age of Proust” and “Marie Laurencin.”

Research for the book was made possible through a Camargo Fellowship and two faculty research grants from the Graduate School at UAB. In 1995, McPherson received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.