This richly diverse study examines the evolving image and contested status of the artist in late nineteenth-century France through the lens of the artist-s studio, which became a central theme in art and literature, stretching from Balzac to Proust and from Corot to Picasso. The studio was a hybrid space that blurred the distinctions between public and private, professional and domestic, artistic production and display. Besides a material space for art making, the studio was a social and commercial nexus and an extension of the artist-s persona. Drawing on paintings, prints, photographs, and primary sources ranging from memoirs to popular journals, this book sheds new light on the modern studio-s heightened significance as a laboratory of creative struggle and a platform for self-expression and the staging of artistic identity. It elucidates how the concept of the studio as a creative space emblematic of artistic identity, first theorized in the Renaissance, was reinvented and populari
