Dr. Sarah Grandin

Sarah Grandin is a specialist in the arts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Her research investigates making and maintenance in the early modern world, particularly in France and the French Empire. In her work, she examines how artists, artisans, and custodians have used materials and techniques to both perform and produce knowledge. To explore these issues, she engages deeply with archival sources, technical treatises, and a wide array of objects. Sarah is also interested in the field of technical art history and in fostering dialogue between conservation scientists, historians, and practitioners.

She received her doctorate in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University after studying Art History and Comparative Literature as an undergraduate at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Courtauld in 2024, she held consecutive curatorial fellowships at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. As the Clark-Getty Paper Project Curatorial Fellow, she co-curated the exhibition Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2022–2023) with Esther Bell and Anne Leonard. As the inaugural Lunde Fellow, she helped launch the Clark’s first catalogue raisonné of early modern European paintings. Her research has received support from the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, the Getty Research Institute, the Chateaubriand, the Fulbright, the Harvard Center for European Studies, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Decorative Arts Trust, and a Harvard exchange with the École normale supérieure.

Her first book, To Scale: Manufacturing Grandeur in the Age of Louis XIV, is in preparation. It will show how ambitious projects launched by the Sun King’s arts administration precipitated shifts in the role of the artisan and in the management of natural resources at the turn of the eighteenth century. By analyzing royal typeface, print volumes, giant carpets, and formal gardens calibrated to glorify the King, the book demonstrates that regularity—across sizes, surfaces, and parts—was of paramount concern to the royal administration. Work from this monograph has appeared in Journal18 and Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Culture.

Sarah is a Managing Editor of Cahiers-Débats, journal of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies, and co-editor with Jennifer Chuong of the upcoming special issue of Journal18 dedicated to “Craft.” She is also collaborating with Catherine Girard on an edited volume dedicated to the global afterlives of animal materials—such as tortoiseshell, coral, and beaver pelts—in the long eighteenth century.

She is at work on two other book-length projects. The first, The World as Album: The ‘Anecdotes’ of the Comte de Maurepas (provisional title), will be the first to examine the vast visual archive of Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, a French naval minister who oversaw colonial occupation in North America under Louis XV. The second looks at intersections of domestic labor and the practice of painting in eighteenth-century France. It has grown out of conference papers delivered on the oeconomie of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s paintings of copper pots and on the prescriptive portrayals of breastfeeding women by Étienne Aubry and others.