Painting and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Italy. 4

Artists, Studios and Self-Portraits

There are a variety of types and we will start with the rarest: the large, ceremonial portrait of the studio during a visit or an important event. An excellent example of this is Marten’s large painting of a papal visit to the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen’s studio paid in 1826, but painted four years later. There are scaled down views of artists’ studios such as the Dublin-born painter Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s view of Canova posing in front of a modello for his famous Cupid and Psyche group watched by his English friend, Henry Tresham who arrived in Rome in 1775. This painting with its aesthetic and social links underlines Canova’s belief in a pan-European artistic community. The most prevalent genre of painting is the self-portrait, which itself can be sub-divided further. There are portraits of artists working (either on their own in the studio or outside) or with members of their family present. Jean Baptiste Lallemand (1716-1803) shows himself working, with his wife and daughter in a studio which also doubles as a living room. Lallemand is seated at a drawing desk surrounded by busts, plaster casts of ancient sculpture, drawings and books. The emphasis on domesticity as well as studio practice is unusual in the genre.¹ Sometimes an artist pushes his family to the foreground while retreating into the shadows, as in Louis Gauffier’s (1762-1801) Self-Portrait with his Wife and Two Children of c. 1793 (above). Originally settled in Rome, Gauffier took his family to flight to Florence following popular unrest with the death of Louis XVI. In his painting the artist sketches a fallen pillar in the Roman compagna while his wife Pauline has put aside her own sketchbook. Pauline was actually an artist and may have painted the portrait of her husband in this melange of art, family and Roman antiquarianism. The next subdivision of the self-portrait genre is the type where the artist shows him or herself next to other painters, as in James Barry’s Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lefvre of 1767. Barry painted this ensemble self-portrait after he had arrived in Rome in October 1766. Paine- furthest from the viewer- was a sculptor while Lefvre was a painter, a pupil of the arch French classicist Joseph Marie Vien. Both Paine and Lefevre are shown painting the celebrated Vatican fragment, the Belvedere Torso while Barry identifies himself as a “defiantly, Romantic youthful genius.”² In contrast, the Edinburgh painter James More shows himself at work out in nature with brushes, palette and holding a small canvas. More was resident in Rome by 1773 and was admired by Canova in Rome and Reynolds in England, while he rivalled another artist friend of Goethe, Jacob Philipp Hackert as a landscape artist. Another artist praised by Reynolds was Angelica Kauffmann who painted her self-portrait four years after More’s. In this beautifully elegant portrayal of herself, the artist may be adhering to Reynold’s stipulation that a truly noble female portrait should have the sitter dressed in “something with the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity.”

1Petra Lamers in Grand Tour exh cat, no. 31.

2Brian Allan, Grand Tour, no. 28.