Abstract

This thesis examines the career of the Quebec-born Old Master copyist Antoine-Sebastien Falardeau (1822-1889), and the conceptual and physical milieu in which he worked. Chapter one corrects and amplifies the biography of the artist. Chapter two proposes a framework within which to set the changes that occurred in the concept(s) and functions of the copy as a traditional way of understanding gave way to the modern. The earlier copy was an accepted part of a system of artistic production in which the work of art was seen as essentially reproducible. With the advent of the Romantic/modern conviction that the art work was the personal, spontaneous production of a specific individual, the copy lost status and its position shifted from the mainstream to the periphery of art production. The nineteenth-century-souvenir copy and the use of copies in the new museums founded to provide a morally-oriented public education are discussed, as is the situation of the copy in Quebec where earlier concepts and functions survived. In Chapter Three the structures and regulations that governed the production of copies in Florence are described. An appendix lists the works produced by Falardeau