Artists are makers of things. Yet, it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun. From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists.

• List of Owners
• Abbreviations & Symbols
• Introduction
• Things
• Taxonomies
  • Chronology by Artist
  • Index by Type of Thing
  • Index by Theme
  • Index by Material
• Further Reading on Things
• Acknowledgments

Katie Scott is professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is a specialist in French art, architecture, and art theory of the early modern period and is the author of The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1996) and Becoming Property: Art, Theory, and Law in Early Modern France (Yale University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a cultural and material history of eighteenth-century Paris.

Hannah Williams is senior lecturer in the History of Art in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. She is a specialist in French visual and material culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Her research focuses on artistic communities, local and global histories of the Paris art world, and the social lives of objects. She is the author of Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Routledge, 2015), awarded the Prix Marianne Roland Michel. She led the creation of the digital mapping project Artists in Paris: Mapping the Eighteenth-Century Art World (www.artistsinparis.org) and is a founding editor of Journal18. She is currently writing a book on art and religion in eighteenth-century Paris and researching a project on art-world ties to French colonies in the Caribbean.