The Artist’s Studio — of shivering nudes and cultural pilgrimage

Artists’ studios are shaped by the needs of their inhabitants — not just artists but also their subjects. During the Renaissance, when nude modelling came into fashion, artists switched from working in public workshops to private studios. This was done for “practical and moral reasons”, explains James Hall, but it had cultural consequences: because artists now worked in secret, they acquired a risqué allure that contributed to their high status during Europe’s period of intellectual flourishing.

Nudity as history maker is one of the more amusing threads that nods in and out of Hall’s smart object biography The Artist’s Studio, which follows a similarly vast project from the author on self-portraiture. Across the millennia we find artists struggling to keep sitters warm. Leonardo da Vinci advised artists to draw nudes in the summer months and spend the winter reviewing those drawings with the Frankenstein-like aim of “select[ing] from among them the best limbs and bodies”.

The 19th-century French realist Gustave Courbet once gave up on a statue of a fisher boy “because my studio does not allow me to have anyone pose in the nude in winter.” Auguste Rodin was an instructive exception: the sculptor was apparently kept in freezing conditions at his studio in Meudon because his long-suffering partner hoped it would suppress his undiscerning libido.

Hall’s interest in artists’ studios stems from our enduring obsession with them. This is the history of a room, but also of the widespread belief “that an artist’s studio is the crucible of creativity”. I have felt this way myself when visiting Francis Bacon’s studio reconstruction in Dublin, where visitors get to peer into a custom-built room from behind glass and try to conjure meaningful narratives out of the extraordinary mountains of junk inside — 7,000 objects, all given the respect of a catalogue entry. This is a “pilgrimage”, writes Hall. He sets out to demonstrate that we have been undertaking a version of it for thousands of years.

The resulting book is not the sort of currently fashionable package of facts and pretty, memoir-ish reflections from the author. Hall approaches his subject as a historian — although with the colloquial ease of years spent as a newspaper art critic — and sticks to a canon he knows intimately, beginning among the Greek gods and ending more or less before the 21st century. Socrates appears early, his frequent visits to Athenian workshops taken as evidence that studios are “good to think with” — a phrase taken from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first Socratic (possibly apocryphal) dialogues were written down by a shoemaker.

One striking image shows a life drawing class at the Royal Academy, its two women members sidelined as half-finished portraits

Socrates’s drop-ins forecast another of Hall’s themes: studios, which are usually borrowed or rented, are all too often treated as quasi-public space. When Bernini made his marble portrait bust of Louis XIV in 1665, it was across 13 sittings attended by the French court during which he was “driven to distraction” by their constant feedback, including on the shape of the Sun King’s nose. Another of his sitters, a lawyer, contrived to forget his portrait bust at the studio because he wanted Bernini’s high-society visitors to see it and think better of him.

In 17th-century Antwerp, visits to Rubens’s bespoke studios became so popular that it prompted Pierre Lebrun to write a bluffers’ guide to free readers from “the fear that your ignorance should be the subject of derision”. Lebrun introduced common art terms and studio accessories, and even furnished readers with a list of appropriate compliments. Here’s one to remember the next time you are called upon to say something nice: “That is not painting, it is nature; and those figures look at the spectators, but with so natural a look that you would swear they were alive.” 

The Artist’s Studio moves chronologically and emphasises practical innovation. Hall details how mirrors transformed portraiture in the 17th century and documents the cumbersome “perspective machines” used in the 15th. One woodcut shows a draughtsman using the contraption — which resembles a large confessional window — to capture what is essentially a crotch shot of a reclining female model.

On women more generally: it’s a pity that the chapter Women in the Studio begins in the 1600s. It funnels the conversation towards their role in men’s studios (consider the subtitle: Inspiration, Destitution, Cleaning, Crimes of Passion) with only occasional mention of women as artists. There is no “room of one’s own” to be found here, and little attention paid to its absence.

Still, the chapter contains one of the most striking images of the 125 included in the book; Johan Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771-72) which shows 32 founder members preparing for a life drawing class. The two women members have been symbolically sidelined; they are represented as half-finished portraits on the wall.

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In a conclusion 14 lines long, Hall throws open the question of what studios might look like with homeworking, climate change and the rise in digital art taken into account. “What the future holds is anyone’s guess,” he writes, unwilling as ever to pontificate. True enough, but anyone looking to make a prediction would benefit from reading this useful book first.

The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History, by James Hall, Thames & Hudson £30, 288 pages

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