This project focuses on a 1786 property map of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) dedicated to the comte de Vaudreuil, a prominent Paris-based art collector whose father had governed the colony. This map records the parceling of land around Cap Français, where many of the island’s most lucrative sugar plantations were located. It is inscribed with surnames, each belonging to a plantation owner. Strikingly, they include some of the highest-profile members of the Paris art world at the time. While these names may be visible on the surface, the deeper histories of the connections they reveal remain unexplored. We propose to create an interactive, digitally enhanced version of this map with an ambitious interface comprising text, image, and linked data that allows users to discover stories and pursue further research. Our project will “remap” the Paris art world in two key ways. Although the 1786 map illustrates crucial if unknown links between colonial networks and art in metropolitan France, it also shows the contribution of unnamed individuals—notably enslaved laborers—whose lives were inextricably linked to the buying and selling of art. We aim to visualize this network of people, objects, and places and publish an open data set and metadata standard that encourages other scholars to build on our research while interrogating mapping as a process. In so doing, we hope to profoundly shift views of the eighteenth-century art world.

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