Artists at work

This selection of drawings from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, mainly from the Katrin Bellinger Collection, illustrates the variety of ways in which artists have represented themselves and others making art. Accompanies an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London.

Artists have long taken pleasure in representing themselves at work, in their studios or academies, out and about in a landscape or recording their own likeness. Immersed in nature, artists are often shown almost lost in the geographical vastness they are recording. Depictions of the artist in the studio are about creative concentration and introspection and, like self-portraits, are reflections on practice and identity. The care taken in recording the studio apparatus of easels, palettes, or assistants grinding pigments, indicates their significance for practitioners. The studio might be the everyday workshop of dirty brushes and sculptural debris, but it is also the place of allegory and myth where artists perform or dream.