The French model of painting seemed prescient, because of its insistence that history and passion go hand in hand. Immediately following the election, I looked to French painting as a school of affect, a repository of figures whose emotions provided a series of lessons in how to behave as a historical agent and how to respond to historical events.

In French art of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the representation of fashionable garments provided artists with a pretext for visual elaboration: for playing with mediums of oil paint, chalk, pencil, and ink, for getting lost in the pleasure of gestural mark-making.