SVETLANA ALPERS

The Studio, the Laboratory,

and the Vexations of Art 1

Seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art
than in its natural freedom.
-FRANCIS BACON, THE GREAT lNSTAURATION

B
eginning in the seventeenth century and continuing well into the twentieth,
roughly from Vermeer's Art of Painting (Figure 1) to Picasso's many self-portraits,2
a succession of European painters has taken the studio as the world. Or, put
differently, the studio is where the world as it gets into painting is experienced. This
was not true of European art before and is not true in other pictorial traditions, such
as those of Asia. The oddity of this assumption and the pictorial concerns and con
straints it entails have not been specifically recognized or defined as such. For one
thing, the artist's immediate experience in the workplace is rarely represented in a
pure state. Many other factors-conventions of realistic representation, relationship
to clients and the marketplace, the nature of display-go into the making and viewing
of paintings that are informed by it. More importantly, while practices in it exhibit
consistent traits, the studio ambience has not lent itself to the kind of discursive
claims that have developed, for example, about the pictorial constructions known as
perspective. The realities of the studio are elusive, but they are also determining and
astonishingly long-lived in European painting. By looking at paintings made both of
402

Figure 1. Jan Venneer, The Arc of Painting, ca. 1665, oil on canvas,
120 cm x 100 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 403

and in the studio, in the seventeenth century and after, my aim, admittedly a contrary
one, is to offer a reasoned account of studio realities.
My subject is neither the studio as an iconographic theme, nor motifs or models
worked after life (though both play a part), but rather the situation in which the two
overlap: when the relation of the artist to reality is seen in the frame of the workplace.
The topic has a certain edge to it today. In some circles, the figure of the painter in the
studio is suspect on ideological grounds. Art produced for or in public venues-from
earthworks, public sculpture, and assemblages to photography and graffiti-is in, while
painting made by someone alone in the studio is out. Caroline Jones, for example,
explained what Andy Warhol's factory was an alternative to: "The dominant topos of
the American artist was that of a solitary (male) genius, alone in his studio, sole wit
ness to the miraculous creation of art."3 A way to counter this is to show that painting
in the studio-for I agree with its antagonists that this is at the heart of the pictorial
medium as we know it-has a narrower and a more humane basis.
In recent times historians and sociologists of science have been considering the role
that the workplace for experimental science plays in the nature and the status of scien
tific knowledge.4 This is part of a change in emphasis from theory to practice, or from
science considered primarily as the building up of natural laws to science as the mak
ing of experiments. When I began to think about the realities of the studio I was
encouraged for several reasons by the example of studies of laboratory work and life.
First, these serve as a corrective. In the study of art not unlike the study of science in
this respect, the precepts of a loose assemblage called art theory are too often privi
leged at the expense of artistic practice itself.
Further, the relationship between the practice of art and the practice of science is
particularly striking in the seventeenth century when the studio, in the sense in which
I am proposing it here, comes into its own. English (Baconian) experimentation and
Dutch descriptive painting share a perceptual or visual metaphor of knowledge of the
world. Though they both represent the world, neither is transparent to it. In one case
it is represented by a technology such as that of the lens, in the other by painting itself.
Experimenting and painting are comparable as conventional crafts. The comparison
works in two directions: it grants a seriousness to painters that is appropriately visual
in nature (treating them as skillful observers rather than as moral preachers), while it
brings experimenters in natural knowledge out of their privileged isolation.5
The model of the laboratory has, however, not worked out for painting, at least not
in the way that I had hoped it would. There are, basically, two reasons for this.
I began intending to pursue the social construction of the artist's workplace. The
questions were to follow on studies of the seventeenth-century house of experiment. 6
Was the site where experiments were conducted a private space or a public one? Was
the work done by individuals working alone, with assistants, or in a group? Who
were witnesses to the findings? But these laboratory questions-which have led to
404 SVETLANA ALPERS

distinctions between private and public workplaces, places of discovery and demon
stration, and have uncovered the essential role of socially inferior assistants-while
perhaps of interest about the actual workspace, were not so productive when directed
to paintings themselves. Part of the problem is that painters represent the studio expe
rience as seen and experienced by an individual.
We know of course that painters often were not alone when at work. There are
Dutch paintings that show a painter sharing his space with students, or assistants, or
even a serving maid. But whatever the conditions behind the production of art, the
phenomena we are concerned with resist the implications of this kind of social con
struction: compare Rembrandt's etchings of a model, or his great picture of Hendrickje
posing for him as Bathsheba, to workshop renderings of him among his students draw
ing a model. Equally, compare Vermeer's Art of Painting (Figure 1) to Mieris's studio
painting (formerly in Berlin), which shows a maid coming in the door of the room
where the artist is painting his model. The studio may, on occasion, have been teem
ing with people. But what is represented as the studio experience is a solitary's view.
There is something obvious about the point-how else but as an individual does one
see and experience one's ambience? This is not, of course, necessarily the concern of
image making. But the fiction sustained by studio painting is that a painter works
alone.
This brings me to the second reason why the studio does not fit the laboratory case.
From its beginning in the seventeenth century, the experience of the painter/observer
was part of the pictorially represented experiment or experience (in the seventeenth
century sense of the word). The realities of the studio are not only what is observed
there (how the world is put together) but the artist's visual and, often, bodily or phe
nomenological experience of it (how it is experienced). What the painter in his/her
painting makes of the world thus experienced is central to the studio as an experimen
tal site. What I am invoking is not a personal matter. It has to do with how every indi
vidual establishes a relationship with the world. One of the vexations of art is man. In
the laboratory, by contrast, the impact of the interference of the human observer in an
account of natural phenomena was neither acknowledged nor taken into account
until modern times, and then with a different effect (see Galison in this volume). It is
possible to argue that the practice of painting was ahead of the practice of science in
regard to the observer. The truth of this might account, at least in part, for the studio's
enduring life.
But the link studio/laboratory does focus attention on the enabling constraints
under which pictorial investigations in the tradition have been conducted. Indeed, it
lets one look on painting as an investigation. What follows are preliminary considera
tions of the problem. I shall first consider what sort of realities the painter can address
in the studio. Turning to the maker, what is the relation of the painter to reality as
seen in the frame of the workplace? Then, most importantly because it reflects back on
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 405

the studio itself, what does not find a place in the studio, or what does the studio
exclude? And what have painters done about it? Finally, a brief consideration of the
depiction of landscape, outside and in, leads to the notion that a basic reality
addressed in the studio is the nature of the studio itself as an instrument of art. With
the reference to an instrument, we return, in a unanticipated sense, to the analogy
offered by laboratory practice.

Let us begin with what 1 take as the baseline case. A person is alone in an empty room
(Figure 2). It is somewhat darker in the room than in the world outside. Light is let in
through several holes in the walls. Curious though it seems, the person has withdrawn
from the world for the purpose of attending better to it. ln this case, as the interior is
empty, he withdraws to attend to the effect of the play of light. This print from
Athanasius Kircher's Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646) is of a camera obscura enlarged
to the size of a room and set in a landscape. The light conveys some trees as images on
the wall.
The painter at work in a picture by Pieter Ellinga Janssens had depicted himself in
such a space (Figure 3). The artist, head silhouetted before a window, stands at an
easel in the further room (the Dutch painter normally used a room in a house as a stu
dio). The interior is dark. Light coming through large windows reflects off the floor,
flooding the far wall and a chair. In the foreground room it puts on a wild show.

Figure 2. Althanasius Kircher, engraved illustration of a camera

obscurafrom Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Rome, 1646).
406 SVETLANA ALPERS

Figure 3. Peter Ellinga]anssens ( 1623-82), Interior with Painter,

Lady Reading and Maidservant, oil on canvas, 83.7 cm x 100 cm.
Stiidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

Sunlight angles through the bright upper part of large windows, casts shadows of the
leading on the lower frame, strikes the floor and the wall, and, impossibly, casts the
shadow of a chair and table back onto the window wall where reflected light glistens
off the glass of the shuttered lower window. A number of pictures (nonreflectors), and
a mirror with gilt frame (light reflectors both) are on the walls. A woman reads by the
secondary light and a maid sweeps. Treetops make a faint pattern on the leaded glass.
Again, an optical matter.
What is it like to be in a particular light?
Other Dutch painters are less flamboyant about it than Janssens. Though he never
depicts himself, the best paintings of Pieter de Hooch are in large part lingering inves
tigations of light seen as if while at work. In his paintings, light enters through win
dows and, often, a distant door, illuminating and reflecting differently off earthen tiles
and metal, fur and gilt. Its interruption is marked by shadows cast by window frames,
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 407

chairs, and other domestic appurtenances within the dusky atmosphere of the interior
of a house. One understands the recommendation, already made by Leonardo, that
light in the studio be from the north. Northern light, as he says, does not vary. It is
never-except occasionally in de Hooch's interiors-direct sunlight. The minimally
interesting figures in these interiors appear to be stilled by the activity of this sunlight.
But de Hooch frequently depicts a child poised to receive the light that floods in
through an open doorway. The painter identifies his experience with that of a child.
Withdrawing from the world into the studio is a regressive act, in that it rehearses how
we come into an experience of the world.
The studio serves as a place to conduct experiments with light not possible in the
diffused universal light or the direct solar light of the world outside. Studio light is
light constrained in diverse ways. And it is also the light the artist is in; he situates
himself in it. This state of affairs is codified in the paintings of Vermeer (Figure 1 ). The
painter, according to Vermeer in The Art of Painting, is the man alone in the room with
which we began. But his working space or ambience (a better, because a less limited,
term) is restricted to a corner. A single window, here hidden by a tapestry, lets light in.
It comes, as is usual, from the left, assuring that the painter's right hand does not cast a
shadow on his painting as he works. The painter is in the light he paints. When,
exceptionally, the light in a painting by Vermeer is from the right (from the left of the
painted figure), it is likely that Vermeer imagines himself in her place. See, for exam
ple, his Lacemaker. Beside her hands is an improbable (for a lacemaker) red tangle of
stuff. Seen at the close distance that the diminutive scale of this painting proposes for
the eye, the red pigment is a deposit of his paint as much as it is a loop of her thread.
What is it like when objects are introduced into the painter's lit room? The essen
tial case in the pictorial tradition is the setup known as still life, for example, one of
Pieter Claesz's spare arrangements featuring a wine glass, a silver bowl, an olive, a nut.
So accustomed are we to tables with objects on them that the oddity of the format has
been lost. They had been depicted earlier, but the still life is first situated in the studio
in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Attention to light is an indication of this
transformation. There had been displays of collectibles in the works of Frans Francken
and Pieter Aertsen, but now the objects on the table, generally domestic in nature, are
lit by light from the (painter's) left. Objects are related to each other by reflections off
neighboring things on the table-a lemon reflected onto a pewter dish, lit pewter back
onto the lemon. The leaded panes of an unseen (studio) window are often reflected on
and even through the surface of a goblet. It is curious, though, that though light
remains an abiding concern for still-life painters from Heda to Chardin to Cezanne,
the window does not figure in the still-life genre itself. Once it was assumed, the light
needed no explanation.
Still lifes of flowers, however, continued as pictures of collectibles. In the seven
teenth century, flowers were not represented in studio light because the blooms of
408 SVETLANA ALPERS

different kinds and seasons-though represented together in a vase-could never be

seen together. In the nineteenth century, rarity goes by the board and flowers in the
vase on the studio table are firmly in place. It then becomes disconcerting to come
upon a painting of flowers (there is one in Hamburg by the young Renoir) that are,
instead, growing in a sunlit flower bed. The diffused light, but also the implied size,
position, and distance are disorienting because we have become used to flowers in the
studio.
The situation with people is a bit different. A person studied by studio light cannot
be put outside in the light of a day. The nude is the most aggravated example of this
constraint. An interest is that we can trace its history. Giorgione, with Titian follow
ing close after, is the presumed inventor of what became the genre of the nude figure in
the landscape. In his Dresden Venus there is no disparity between the light on the flesh
and that on the terrain in which she lies. Light is diffused and universal. This is prior
to the studio in the sense in which we are speaking of it here. Once a nude body is
painted (as distinguished from being drawn) in studio light and at studio proximity, it
is incongruent when set outside. The problem surfaces in the nineteenth century,
most egregiously with the Impressionists. Frederic Bazille bares it in his paintings that
insert a nude man, studio-lit, who appears not on, but silhouetted against, a sunlit
river bank. 7 Some accommodation must be made. Degas recommended representing
nude figures outside at twilight when they appear as silhouettes.

The still-life assemblage has come to be understood as a bourgeois phenomenon. This

is to consider its objects as subordinate to man, for our use, manipulation, and enjoy
ment, conveying our sense of power over things. To paraphrase Meyer Schapiro, still
life in this interpretation is the construction of a portable possession. 8 But taking the
empty room once more as the baseline, there is a prior sense in which the objects on
the table-one can expand this to any objects or people in the studio-are an intru
sion on the painter who has retired there. They register something the painter deals
with or, perhaps better, plays with in paint. Still-life objects are depicted as if at arm's
length and approximately life-size. The distance from what the artist paints is a reality
of the studio (studio-size would be perhaps a more accurate description than life-size).
The studio is, in an almost primordial sense, a place where things are introduced in the
interest of being experienced.
The representation of the painter's hand in Vermeer's Art of Painting offers a height
ened instance of this studio experience. A shaded blob is where the hand of the
painter painting the blue and tawny leaves on the model's wreath should be. Why
such an ill-defined blob? One could say that the painter has not yet realized his hand,
in the double sense of not yet having fully perceived it as a hand and not yet having
fashioned it as a hand. But there is a further twist: the shaded blob also appears to be
part of the painting the artist is painting within the painting. Taken together with the
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 409

leaves he is putting on the canvas, it has the appearance of the face of the model pos
ing topped by a wreath. (A bit of white at the wrist is the white collar at her neck, the
dark cuff standing out to its right and down is the cloth behind her neck.)
We have caught the painter in the studio playing with his hand in paint. The hand,
if you think of it, is the object that a painter always has at arm's length immediately
before him while working. (Velazquez, in his studio in Las Meninas, and Rembrandt in
his in the Kenwood Self-Portrait, also register this fact: Velazquez's hand mimicking
the color and directionality of worked pigments, Rembrandt's hand mimicking the
instruments with which he paints.) On Vermeer's account its representational status is
unresolved. Though it is part of his body, the hand is represented neither as belonging
entirely to him, nor entirely as an object in the world, nor entirely as a painted image.
We might dub it transitional-involving the relationship, perceptual but also psycho
logical, between an individual and the world.
An experience of ambiguity is a part of the process of perceiving. Our mind works,
albeit quickly, from multiple and conflicting visual clues to work out the place, shape,
and identity of what it attends to. Pictorial equivocation had been entertained by
painters before the seventeenth century. By equivocation I refer to the possibility of
the painter representing the perception of a thing, and representing it for viewers, in
such a way as to encourage the mind to dwell on perceiving it as a process: the painter's
experience of an object as coming into its own, distinguishing itself from others, tak
ing shape. He looks at a modeled blob not yet recognizable as a hand and also sees it as
the flesh of a painted face. The difference the studio site makes is that it frames the
ambiguity as an originating one. In the studio, the individual's experience of the world
is staged as if it ( experience, that is) is at its beginning. This gives to studio painting a
forward, probing lean. It is a matter of discovering, not demonstrating.
To return to how experience begins is regressive. And it is in this connection that a
certain line of studio paintings dwell on objects whose status or nature remains unre
solved., I think of Degas's disturbing Portrait of an Artist in his Studio, now in Lisbon.
Beyond a huge foregrounded palette, the painter, a Degas look-alike, leans against a
wall. In a painting to one side a woman is lounging against a tree; her twin, similarly
dressed, is grotesquely slumped against the wall to the other side. Is she grotesque
because she is only the artist's lay figure? The Courtauld's famous Cezanne painting,
Still Life with Amor, again suggests a vertiginous experiencing of the studio as the
world: the green top of a still-life onion on a table top turning up into a painting, a
plaster sculpture ( the "amor") echoed in the truncated drawing of the statue of a flayed
man. What Vermeer kept largely under representational wraps is exposed. One senses
a resistance on the part of the objects in view, which are being bent, against their will,
to be part of the painter's experience. The game can be destructive.
I can't resist introducing into the discussion a squiggle drawn by the British psy
choanalyst D. W. Winnicott, a drawing of an object on a pedestal that is inscribed
410 SVETLANA ALPERS

"Frustrated Sculpture (wanted to be an ordinary thing). "9 Its relevance is pictorial (it
looks rather like Cezanne's flayed man) and also psychological. Winnicott's observa
tion of the infant's pre-linguistic experiencing of the world is suggestive, as is his focus
ing on the one-on-one relationship of person to world. The painter in the studio
engages in creative play. And even what this formulation strikingly leaves out or can
not deal with-things beyond an individual's reach or long-term memory or the
repressed desires of Freudian dreams-is relevant to the constraints on the studio
painter's practice.

The retreat to the studio, which is one way to understand it, was celebrated in the sev
enteenth century by some remarkable self-portraits by artists as painters: Rembrandt
at Kenwood and in Paris, Poussin in Paris, the so-called Las Meninas of Velazquez and,
though not openly a self-portrait, Vermeer's Art of Painting. The circumstances of these
various canvases are diverse. They were made in different places, on different occa
sions, for different clients. But each painter, in his own context, dealt with the newly
ambiguous role of the artist. For each of them-whether at court (Velazquez), in the
home (Vermeer), or away from either (Rembrandt, Poussin)-the working space
offers a provisional solution. It is a way to define ground which is the painter's own.
Attention to studio realities marks the end of European history painting as it had
been. Painters withdraw from depicting significant (text-related) actions (religious,
mythological, and historical) taking place in a greater world. With the striking excep
tion of Rubens, who might be described as an old believer, the imaginary theater is
over. (Poussin and the French who follow constitute history painting in new and dif
ferent terms.)
One can distinguish two different paths into the studio, both of which have had a
long life. After his Christ with Mary and Martha, Diana, and (the newly discovered) St.
Praxedis , Vermeer turned to objects and people appropriate to the domestic situation
of his workplace. The imaginary theater survives only in pictures on the wall. Rem
brandt and Caravaggio, by contrast, try to bring the themes of history painting into
studios that are not specifically domestic. They deploy models performing in the stu
dio to replace the dramatic figures of history painting. Late in his career, Rembrandt
repeatedly represented people who sat in his studio in such a way as to suggest histori
cal personages. A favorite model poses as Aristotle, Hendrickje poses as Bathsheba.
Rembrandt attaches historical themes to portraiture, an essential studio genre.
Caravaggio, by contrast, persists in depicting dramatic enactments that, however,
he stages with models in the studio. He signals this by a darkened interior and by the
lighting, scale, and proximity to him of figures, in particular their flesh and accou
trements. One might describe Caravaggio as configuring historical themes as a sort of
still life, the other essential studio genre. He was accused at the time of killing off
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 41 1

painting by following nature too closely. Behind the accusation was a notion that art is
more or less either after nature ( the real) or out of the mind ( the ideal). But studio
practice-in which nature is vexed by art-confounds these terms. It is painting in
the studio, not nature, that poses the threat to painting as it had been.
But the studio presents problems for the artist. Call them strains or call them
vexations of art. Prominent among these is the fact that it leaves outside so much
of the world and that its condition is that of isolation. Both lead to trying to make
connections.
Poussin, as has been recently shown, conceived of his paintings not as sold, but as
circulating among friends. He defined the market for his pictures not by an exchange
of money ( though that did take place) but by an exchange of friendship, which is rep
resented by embracing arms in his Paris Self-portrait. 10 One response to the solitude of
the studio is to reach out for company. Poussin read and admired Montaigne. It could
be that like Montaigne alone in his tower, Poussin valued friendship all the more for
the solitude of the studio, depicted here by a stack of empty frames. The court visita
tions to his studio that Velazquez arranged, like the busy workplaces of his so-called
Spinners or of Vulcan and his helpers that he also devised, do not disguise the fact that
the painter of Las Meninas was an elusive loner. It is surprising that Velazquez painted
his own portrait at all.
At one level painters have simply tried to buck the studio limits. Surely you can't
bring a horse in to model? Well, Horace Vernet did and commemorated the event by
painting it. Courbet, choosing the lower road, elected instead a cow. The cow model
ing in the studio was the butt of a contemporary print that gets at Courbet's realism,
but also of course at his misuse of the studio. What is a cow doing there as the object of
serious painterly attention? A similar question could be raised about Courbet's own
painting of his studio. Why is the studio so very large and crowded with so many
people? Courbet gave it a long title and described in a letter and it has been the subject
of much interpretive analysis. Without going into the many particulars, one could say
that his is a grandiose attempt to make the studio large enough ( the painting is 1 2
feet x 2 0 feet or 3 . 6 meters X 6 meters) to encompass the world-at least, that is, the
world of friends and models.
It also takes up two other problems in the studio: it deals with time past and pro
vides the artist with company. The Painter's Studio, a real allegory determining a phase of
a seven-years of my artistic life is a fair translation of the title Courbet gave his picture.
Studio experience is by its nature in and of the present. Remember the empty, light
filled room with which we began. Like the perception/experience that it sustains and
extends, it leads forward, not back to the past. Courbet counters this forward lean by
bringing in figures and models from history-his own history and paintings past. This
convocation of people also saves the artist from himself, from his isolation in the
412 sve:n.ANA ALPERS

studio. But about this Courbet is clearly ambivalent. Invoking the world and the past,
he simultaneously turns his back on it all, with a flourish, to paint a landscape. It seems
another piece of the world he is trying to get in.
I want to end with the problematic case of the relationship between landscape and
the studio. Already in the sixteenth century Pieter Bruegel made drawings of moun
tainous valleys outside. Later, Constable did oil sketches of clouds. Bur as a rule, before
the nineteenth century they executed their landscape paintings in the studio, removed
from seeing the thing itself. An accepted account of the history of landscape painting
turns on locating the moment when painters free themselves from the studio and its
conventions and paint in the real landscape outside. This account, a nineteenth
century landscape one, posits the world as the alternative to the studio-the painter
went out to do empirical studies and came in to compose. The story is told of Monet
digging a ditch in which to lower his large canvas when he went out to capture the
"real" play of light and shadow playing on the dresses of women in a garden. A number
of painters came to accept the inconvenience, the glare and changing light, decompo
sition, and challenge to the integrity of the figure encountered in the studio that
painting in the world outside the studio entailed.
But there was another departure in taking up landscape, in which the studio
remained a determining factor. Thomas Jones, an Englishman working in Italy in the
11
1780s, is celebrated as one of the first Europeans to work with oil paint ourdoors. Liv-

Figure 4. Thomas Jones, The Bay of Naples, ca. 1782,

oil on canvas, 91 .4 cm x 15 2.4 cm. Private collectio n.
 THE STU Dl0, THE LABORATORY, ANO THE VEXATIONS OF ART 4 L}

Figu re 5. Thomas Jones, Rooftops, Naples, April 1782,

oil on paper, 14 .3 cm x 35 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

ing in Naples in 1 782, he turned from painting panoramic views of bay and hills com
plete with conventional repoussoir trees (Figure 4) to making, instead, marvelous oil
sketches on paper of rooftops close-by seen in a brilliant sun (Figure 5). But are Jones's
tiny sketches really studio-free? Obviously, they are different from his other landscapes.
They seem more immediately experienced. Jones viewed what he painted from his
window or roof. And what we admire in his rooftops is something experienced and
represented as if on a tabletop in the studio. The small scale (5 in. x 8 - 13 in. or 1 4
cm. x 2 1- 35 cm.), close handling, and the steady light are that of a still life. Some
thing about this is very odd indeed. How can one put the landscape on a table like the
objects of a still life? Or to put it differently, how can one experience something with
the expanse of a landscape- its mountains, hills, trees- and its movement- the
clou<ls- as if it had the visual an<l bo<lily presence and the immobility of objects on a
table?
The answer is that one can't, at least nor without changing the nature of the reali
ties addressed in the studio. Jones's juxtaposed, lit walls are easily accommodated to
the tabletop. But they are buildings, not the land and sky itself. What would happen if
the painter proposed experiencing something that cannot be experienced in the stu
dio t That is to say, proposed experiencing something without a proper body in a studio
way? It is like proposing Vermeer or Chardin painting a landscape. (Vermeer of course
painted a View of Delfc. But its status is not like that ofobjects in the studio, but rather
of the images cast by light onto the wall in the camera obscura box with which we
began. Delft is present, but only to the eye.)
The experiment of experiencing landscape as a still-life motif was one devised by
Cezanne. Despite his treks outside to paint, Cezanne's landscapes share with his still
lifes the studio terrain. To treat landscape in the studio in this way is to alter the nature
414 SVETLANA ALPERS

Figure 6. Paul Cezanne, Rocks and Hills in Provence, ca. 1886- 90,
oil on canvas, 65 cm x 81 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

of painting. It is one thing to display the buildup of still-life objects with pigment and
brush, quite something different to do that, as does Cezanne, painting a landscape
(Figure 6). Cezanne's often-remarked sacrifice of light in the studio (light is in fact
accounted for within the brush strokes themselves) is part of this accommodation.
Indeed as landscape approaches the nature of still life, so his still lifes, often depicted
before the woven leaves of a tapestry, approach the nature of landscape. The differ
ence between things- between landscape as a motif and still life, or between rocks
and trees fields before mountains and bowls or a vase on table tops backed by tapes
tried leaves- is minimized in the process of painting. Studio representation is con
strued differently, pitched at a different level than it had been before.

I have some concerns about the account I have offered of the realities of the studio.
First, once these are in place in the seventeenth century, they are too persistent, too
much out of time, lacking in historical context. An explanation might be, and though
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 415

I think it holds others might well not agree, that something constant in the human
perception of the world and its representation was put in place in the art of the studio.
Second, are studio practice and laboratory practice, finally, incompatible? The
landscape tum we have just looked at marks a real and addressable change. ls there
any account of laboratory practice that can help us better describe and hence under
stand this studio change? I think there might be. It is the account offered by Gali
son and Assmus of the transformation in the use of the experimental chamber devised
and set up in the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, England, in the late 1890s: an
instrument designed in order to reproduce clouds came to be used instead to detect
subatomic , parttc
les. 12
Put too simply, the physical meteorologist C. T. R. Wilson built his cloud chamber
in order to reproduce atmospheric phenomena of the real world in the laboratory: his
hypothesis was that condensation nuclei were electrical ions. In its condensation of
artificial clouds, his experimental apparatus imitated nature. But working beside
Wilson at the Cavendish laboratory were men who were not interested in studying
the world that was being imitated within the chamber (clouds) but rather the real
things-small, as yet unobserved subatomic particles-that were made visible in the
condensation produced there.
The transformation of the meteorologist's dust chamber into the physicist's cloud
chamber is felicitously described by Galison and Assmus as a change from mimetic to
analytic experimentation. Their title puts it succinctly : artificial clouds, real particles.
Couldn't we describe Cezanne's innovation in similar terms? From artificial landscape
to real constituents of things as we perceive them? Perhaps this is a more appropriate
way of saying (to quote myself above) that with Cezanne, "studio representation is
construed differently, pitched at a different level than it had been before." And the
paradox in the scientists' changing use of the chamber in Cambridge might also be
said to have obtained in the studios of painters. To take up the terms offered by Gali
son and Assmus again, the mimetic researcher attended to artifice, while the analytic
researcher pursued real things.
But it is not only the terms-mimetic to analytic-that I want to note. There is a
further and more general interest in this tale of experimental Cambridge. The account
emphasizes the activity of experimenters in establishing the character of an instru
ment (here the chamber) and the effects produced with it. Every instrument produces
artifacts/effects that are intrinsic to its construction. But the nature of an instru
ment and the interpretation of the artifacts produced by it are also subject to human
manipulation and interpretation. The lens or glass and the camera obscura are among
the most familiar instruments that were used by experimenters in natural knowledge
and artists alike. But encouraged by the evocative account of the chamber in Cam
bridge (and admittedly charmed by the metaphoric affinity chamber-studio), we might
consider the studio itself as such an instrument. Perhaps it is here, in the uses of an
416 SVETLANA ALPERS

experimental instrument, that there is a fruitful analogy between the artist and the
experimenter, between painting and experimenting.
Starting in the seventeenth century, so an account might go, European artists began
to consider the studio as a basic instrument of their art. For some, it was not simply the
site where they worked, but the very condition of working. The studio as instrument is
an invention that has had a long life-from Pieter Janssens's studio as a light box, to
Cezanne's studio as a state, or frame, of mind. The historical project, not unlike that
which engages historians of science, is to track the changing character of the studio
as-instrument while resisting the tendency to consider it and its products as either
simply conventional (the default of art) or simply transparent to the world ( the default
of science).

A coda. The art/science link to which I was educated privileged the notion of devel
opment and progress. It was argued that the problem-solving nature of Italian Renais
sance art made it the model for the progress in human knowledge that later came to be
associated with science. Here is Gombrich: "The artist works like a scientist. His
works exist not only for their own sake but also to demonstrate certain problem
solutions."13 The immediate reference was what he and others took to be the scientific
and demonstrable character of perspective. The studio-laboratory link focuses instead
on the constraints under which knowledge is achieved. What is being tracked are the
changing conditions of pictorial knowledge, rather than its progress.

Notes

l . This is part of work in progress. I wish to thank to Peter Galison for his persistent encouragement to
publish at this stage. The unresolved note on which the paper ends is also, in a sense, due to him. For
that I owe an apology. It was only in the course of reshaping the paper for publication that l came to
see the broader implications that Galison's account of the cloud chamber might have for an account
of the artist's studio.
2. See, in particular, Picasso's Self-Portrait in the Boulevard Raspail Studio, 1 9 1 3 , Musee Picasso, Paris.
3. Caroline A. Jones, "Andy Warhol's 'Factory': The Production Site, Its Context and Its Impact on the
Work of Art," Science in Context 4, 1 ( 1 990): 1 0 1 .
4 . See David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the
Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 989) and Brian Peppard's shrewd
account of its implications in the Times Literary Supplement, September 29-0ctober 5 , 1 989, p. 1057.
5. For a substantiated account from the point of view of the practice of art, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art
of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 983 ) .
6 . Prominent among studies of early laboratory spaces are Owen Hannaway, "Laboratory Design and
the Aim of Science," Isis 77 ( 1 986 ) : 585-61 0 and Steven Shapin, "The House of Experiment in Sev
enteenth Century England," Isis 79 ( 1988): 373-404.
7. See, for example, Bazille's Fisherman with Net, oil on canvas, 134 cm x 83 cm, Foundation Rau,
Zurich.
8. Meyer Schapiro, 'The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-life," Selected Papers:
Modem Art, 1 9th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), pp. 1 8-19.
 THE STUDIO, THE LABORATORY, AND THE VEXATIONS OF ART 41 7

9. Illustrated as the frontispiece to Winnicott and Paradox: From Birth to Creation ( London: Tavistock
Publications, 1 98 7 ) .
10. Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicholas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Prince
ton: Princeton University Press, 1 996), pp. 1 77-2 1 5 .
1 1 . For Thomas Jones, see Lawrence Gowing, The Originality of Thomas Jones ( London: Thames and
Hudson, 1985). Since this publication, it has been shown that working outdoors was not such an iso
lated phenomenon. See Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical Landscape
Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1 99 1 ).
1 2 . Peter Galison and Alexi Assmus, "Artificial Clouds, Real Particles," in The Uses of Experiment, ed.
David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 989 ),
pp. 225-7 4. See also Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics ( Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 1 997 ) .
1 3 . E . H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress," Norm and Form ( London:
Phaidon Press, 1 966), p. 7 .