Workshop artists
The pet portrait painter painting remotely and developing a unique style is quite a modern concept.
Until the close of the 18th century successful painters ran businesses in which methods of production, quality control and sales to customers were often very highly organised. In medieval times and during the Renaissance these were conducted in places that were literally workshops, usually rooms on the ground floor of a building that could be opened onto the street by means of shutter doors, thus acting as both a shop and a studio. Painting was undertaken in these workshops commercially, as a modern trade or profession does today. Whilst creativity was encompassed in a way, it was tolerated within certain limits, with the concentration on skilled use and understanding of the materials.
A workshop like this would belong to a master who, if became successful enough, would take on assistants and train apprentices. Everything relevant to the production of paintings, from extracting pigments to laying a varnish, would form part of the workshops activities, and this body of accumulated knowledge would be passed on from master to pupil. As the painters’ studios developed, each new generation carried with them not only their own experience but also that gained from all their predecessors.
By the 16th century the more successful studios, like those of Titian and Raphael, must have been painting factories. These workshops would output great quanitites of work, a large part of which would have been done by assistants. Large studios continued into the next century with painters like Rubens’ and Van Dyck, but at some stage during the 17th century the system began to break down. There was a pronounced fall in technical excellence, as methods became sloppy.
By the 18th century painting was still considered a trade, but as painters lost the knowledge of technique in favour of creativity, the recognition of personal genius became something that all painters aspired to. Approaching art from an intellectual stand point in this way offered the painter a socially acceptable route to greater status.
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