Histories of the self: Anne-Louis Girodet and the Trioson portrait series

Between 1797 and 1804, the French artist Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson produced a series of portraits depicting a young boy, the son of the artist’s mentor Benoît-François Trioson. The paintings chart the development of a single boy, but they also reference contemporaneous scientific and philosophical discourses that share the paintings’ preoccupation with temporality. By considering the Trioson portrait series in relation to these discourses, I argue that they compel us to think more expansively about the durational nature of selfhood and history at the end of the eighteenth-century.