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 trace the development of a single child, but they also reference contemporaneous scientific and philosophical discourses that share the series' preoccupation with temporality. By considering the Trioson portraits in relation to these discourses, this article argues that the paintings disclose the durational—or even historical—nature of selfhood at the end of the eighteenth century.