Artists' Things

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, Francois Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigee-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-Honore Fragonard's color box and Jacques-Louis David's table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Simeon Chardin's cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like Francois 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.