The Artist's Studio

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The studio has long served as a stage on which artists present their calling. Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (c. 1435–40) shows the patron saint of painters sketching the Virgin and Child, and Johannes Vermeer's The Art of Painting (c. 1666–68) draws back a curtain on a painter at work before a model dressed as Clio, muse of history. Frédéric Bazille's Bazille's Studio (1870) gathers friends in his Paris rooms, with the tall host himself painted in by Édouard Manet.

Later the working room became a subject for its clutter and solitude. Constantin Brancusi photographed his sculptures among the plaster dust of his Paris studio, and Francis Bacon's crowded London studio was so bound up with his art that it was later moved, contents and all, to Dublin. Lucian Freud's Painter Working, Reflection (1993) shows the artist naked but for unlaced boots, palette knife in hand.