Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

Grigsby in her book considers six individual works of four artists – Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix – painted in the decades following the French Revolution. These paintings graphically show violent events in distant, colonial lands. She argues that their 'disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics.' These works, she says, set in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece, are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure.
 
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is associate professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents 
1 Black Revolution – Saint-Domingue: Girodet's Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies, 1797
2 Plague – Egypt-Syria: Gros's Bonaparte visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, 1804
3 Revolt – Egypt: Girodet's Revolt of Cairo, 1810
4 Cannibalism – Senegal: Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, 1819
5 Blood-Mixing – Ottoman Greece: Delacroix's Massacres of Chios, 1824
6 White Slavery – Ottoman Africa: Delacroix's Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826
Select Bibliography
Index