PREFACE, Artists at Home

PREFACE, Artists at Home

1884

Frederick George Stephens (1828-1907), author and editor

F. G. Stephens, Artists at Home, photographed by J. P. Mayall and reproduced in facsimile by photoengraving on copper plates; edited, with biographical notes and descriptions, by Frederick George Stephens (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington; New York: Appleton & Co., 1884), n.p.

December 1884

The Preface occupies two pages of text. It follows the Publisher's Note and precedes the table of contents.

The history of depictions of artists' studios.

Dianne Sachko MacLeod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 402.

Julie Codell,  The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56-59.

The online edition of this work in the public domain, i.e., not protected by copyright, has been produced by the National Gallery of Art.

NGA_Preface1.jpg and NGA_Preface2.jpg

Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Omeka record contributed by Linda Merrill

October 16, 2016

P R E F A C E.

In biographical and historical interest no pictures surpass views of the interiors of artists’ studios, the oldest of which are, so far as I know, sketches of Egyptian origin, showing how walls and mummy cases were decorated on the banks of the Nile many thousands of years ago. The art-crafts of glass-blowing and vase painting are well understood by means of Egyptian drawings. Statuaries and statue painters in their ateliers are depicted at Beni-Hassan. Sir Thomas Browne would have helped us to guess at the appearance of Bezaleel and Aholiab while making the Tabernacle, but I cannot recall to mind a delineation of even a Greek sculptor at work, although there are effigies of men holding implements of art, modeling-tools and the like, to be seen in antique, probably Roman, bassi-relievi. The knight of Norwich could have given lively pictures, in words, of that marvel, the pre-historic draughtsman, the most ancient master known, whose skill and acutest observation incised upon the bones of his dinner the turning eye and twinkling ear of the doe, alarmed by the artist’s movements in the brake whence he watched her. But all this is, as Sir Thomas himself was wont to say, mere matter of conjecture, although it be built on the sure foundations of those bone-drawings by the immemorial artist which are now preserved in “cabinets of the curious.”

            We are, however, upon the surest ground before the engravings which reproduce a work found in the so-called Casa Carolina at Pompeii, which is neither more nor less than a satirical picture of a hunch-backed portrait-painter in his study taking the likeness of a gentleman, who, in a carefully arranged toga, and with his hair in complete order, sits stiffly on a stool. Two pigmy amateurs, and a goose—no doubt the art-critic of the day—enter the chamber on one side, while, on the other side, a colour-grinder pursues his vocation in an idle fashion, and a pupil turns from his drawing-board in evident disgust because the visitors chatter too loudly. A charming Magna-Grecian picture of a female artist copying in colours a term of the bearded Bacchus comprises a view of her own studio—with a framed design hanging all askew on the wall—and was taken from Pompeii to Naples about sixty years since. St. Luke himself, busily painting, was a frequent subject for quasi-Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic artists of devotional pictures in tempera and glass. The tutelary saint of the painters preserved his honours of delineation in many modes until, in a manner which is grotesque, and in 1532, Martin Van Heemskerck depicted him taking the portrait of the Virgin. The Dutchman meant well, but his effort was absurd.

            Several mediæval miniatures represent illuminators and scribes at work in the scriptoria of their monasteries, and one of the most curious illustrations of the engraver’s art is that humorous drawing (B. M. Add. MSS., Nos. 10, 292-‘3-‘4) which shows how, c. 1316, une duchoise ordered certain letters to be carved about an incised monumental effigy which, as the lady wears a wimple, and is evidently recovering from her sorrow, must have been the portrait of her deceased spouse. An incised slab in the Church of St. Ouen at Rouen displays two architects with their implements of drawing, and is dated c. 1440. Many early German woodcuts and engravings give us engravers, carvers, and painters at work. The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century occasionally represented the interiors of their studios, and several of their pictures have interest equal to that of the series of portraits I have the honour to introduce to the reader, because they comprise likenesses of men of renown, and, as some of our photographs do, they afford faithful representations of famous pictures. Teniers and Francks exercised themselves in this way. There is a magnificent instance by the former in the collection of the Duke of Cleveland at Raby Castle. A picture of this kind, attributed to Teniers, is now No. 88 in the Academy Exhibition. “The Archduke’s Gallery,” by him, is a superb example now at Madrid; it contains portraits of other artists at work. Ostade painted himself in the act of painting, and his picture is now at Dresden. Some great Italian masters depicted their contemporaries while engaged in art, and Rubens and Van Dyck delineated theirs similarly occupied.

            From these examples we descend rapidly to the eighteenth century during which period such subjects as those in question were rarely, if ever, essayed in England, until Hogarth took his own likeness while seated at an easel, and thus produced a little picture of the most delightful biographical value, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The Earl of Derby has at Knowsley a capital group by Hogarth of Monamy the sea-painter showing a picture on the easel to his patron. Winstanley took his own portrait while seated at work with a palette on his thumb. Reynolds represented himself shading his eyes from the light, holding a palette and brushes, and as if he were taking his own likeness from a mirror. This picture hangs near the former Hogarth at South Kensington. Zoffany’s interesting groups of portraits of the Royal Academicians in the Old Life School at Somerset House, painted in 1773, is now at Buckingham Palace, and brings us near to our own time. Likewise in that place is the same painter’s “Interior of the Florentine Gallery,” an analogous instance, comprising portraits of men of note and famous works of art; a picture fit to be matched with Teniers’s masterpieces. Henry Singleton painted the Royal Academicians in General Assembly in 1793, a picture which is now in the gallery at Burlington House. Vernet painted the famous “Raphaël au Vatican,” which is in the Luxembourg, and one of M. Meissonier’s masterpieces in small is the “Amateurs de Peinture,” in which two gentlemen watch an artist diligently painting.

            Having thus, so far as a morning’s work allowed, endeavoured to show what has been done in representing bygone artists in their studios, I may be permitted to introduce these pictures of the living to the reader.

F. G. STEPHENS.

 

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