Isabelle Sagraves

Félix Buhot and the Borders of Print in Nineteenth-Century France

PhD Supervisor: Richard Taws (primary); Tamar Garb (secondary)
Working Title: Félix Buhot and the Borders of Print in Nineteenth-Century France

a black and white image of a woman in a park looking back at the camera

My research uses the under-studied French printmaker Félix Buhot (1847–1898) as a lens through which to examine the intersections of print processes and politics between the establishment of the Third Republic and the turn of the twentieth century (1871–1900). 

For Buhot, borders function as formal, technical and social concepts that cut across the printerly and political. Buhot surrounded his experimental prints with a compositional device that he termed “symphonic margins,” creating border areas that are designed to harmonize with the central image rather than merely frame it. At the same time, Buhot’s work addresses boundaries between modernity (“impressionism”) and history (“romanticism”), between the urban and the regional, between media distinctions, and between private self and public identity. Ultimately, I argue that Buhot’s borders are relevant beyond the edges of his works, and that they can reveal much about the implications of social categorizations and divisions in nineteenth-century France. 

Prior to UCL, I spent two years as the Florence B. Selden Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery. I have also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, where I have contributed to exhibitions on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. I received my BA from Vanderbilt University in 2019 and my MA from the Courtauld in 2021; there, my dissertation repositioned Berthe Morisot’s late works within the context of Symbolism. 

My PhD is fully funded by the UCL Research Excellence Scholarship.

Publications

  • “Wartime Impressions: French Prints of the First World War from the Eric Gustav Carlson Collection,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2022-2023 (2023), pp. 17-23.
  • “Mary Cassatt, The Lamp”; “Charles Demuth, Green Pears”; “Thomas Eakins, John Biglin in a Single Scull”; “Henrietta Johnston, Ann Broughton (Mrs. John Gibbs)”; “Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre”; “John Singer Sargent, The Salute, Venice”; in American Art: Selections from the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 2023).
  • “Minimalism: Works from the Permanent Collection,” Yale University Art Gallery Magazine (Spring 2023), pp. 8-9.

Conference Papers

  • “Marginality in Félix Buhot’s Etchings,” Workshopping Future Directions in Impressionism, Impressionist Futures (London, September 5-9 2024)
  • “‘Playing Juliet,’ Painting Julie: Navigating Symbolism and Gender in Berthe Morisot’s Paintings of the 1890s,” CAA Annual Conference (New York, February 2023).
  • “A Comparison of John Sloan, Sunday, Woman Drying their Hair, 1912, and Walter Bayes, The Underworld: Taking Cover in a Tube Station During a London Air Raid 1918,” Ashcan School & Camden Town Group Comparative Workshop Conference, Bowdoin College (Online, April 2021).

Teaching

  • Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, First-Year History of Art Survey, c. 1600-Contemporary, UCL History of Art Department, Spring Term 2025

Awards 

  • UCL Research Excellence Scholarship, 2023
  • Cooley Prize for the Senior Graduating Art History Major with the Highest GPA, Vanderbilt University, 2019
  • Outstanding Undergraduate English Major Award, Vanderbilt University, 2019

Contact: isabelle.sagraves.23@ucl.ac.uk
Instagram: @isabelle.sagraves

RPS Profile

Qualifications 

  • M.A. in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2021 (High Distinction)
  • B.A. in History of Art and English Literary Studies, 2019 (Summa cum laude)