Enfilade

From The Getty:

Katie Scott and Hannah Williams, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 374 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068632, $60. With free digital editions available.

Histories of artists’ personal possessions shed new light on the lives of their owners.

Artists are makers of things. Yet it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists.

The free online edition of this open-access publication, with zoomable illustrations, is available here. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

Katie Scott is professor of the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Hannah Williams is senior lecturer in the history of art at Queen Mary University of London.

From Unicorn:

Caroline Chapman, A Place Apart: The Artist’s Studio, 1400–1900 (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2023), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1911397687, £25.

Exotic lair, freezing garret, or convivial rendezvous, artists’ studios reflect their personalities, the way they work, their dreams, and obsessions. Some are battlegrounds where hopes are dashed and original concepts fail dismally in their execution. A few artists became celebrities and flaunted their success by furnishing huge studios with exotic objects, while others lived in a haze of opium in squalid tenements in Montmartre. Spanning 500 years of Western art history from 1400 to 1900, A Place Apart describes the skilful techniques employed in a Renaissance workshop, Michelangelo’s agony and ecstasy while painting the Sistine Chapel, the murky world of the artist’s model, the looting by Napoleon of Veronese’s masterpiece, Van Gogh’s wretched first studio, how Géricault painted his Raft of the Medusa, the way Rodin worked in his plaster-spattered environment, and the ateliers of the Impressionists in Paris.

Caroline Chapman worked as a picture researcher for many of the principal UK publishers before becoming an editor and an author. Her publications include Russell of The Times: War Dispatches and Diaries, Elizabeth and Georgiana: The Duke of Devonshire and His Two Duchesses, John and Joséphine: The Creation of The Bowes Museum, Eighteenth-Century Women Artists: Their Trials and Tribulations, and Nineteenth-Century Women Artists: Sisters of the Brush.