The Artist’s Studio, Rue Visconti, Paris

The Artist's Studio on the Rue Visconti documents the physical conditions of Bazille's early Paris career — the cramped studio he shared with Monet and Renoir for a period — as a subject in itself, following a tradition of studio paintings that runs from Courbet's Atelier du peintre through the Dutch 17th-century tradition of painters in their workrooms. The painting is both a document of the shared poverty of the future Impressionists in the late 1860s — the three men sometimes shared costs so basic they were cold in winter — and a statement about the studio as the site of modern artistic production, with stacked canvases visible as evidence of ongoing work.

The studio interior demands a complex management of the narrow vertical space, with the high ceiling, angled light from a skylight or high window, and the clutter of artistic production all requiring careful spatial organization. Bazille renders the stacked paintings with a flatness that makes them legible as objects rather than images within images.