As every art historian and material culture historian knows, the most basic objects— those that we encounter during the course of our lives—are central elements to our being, and the same held true for the French eighteenth-century artist. It is this question of the relationship between the artist and the objects they owned that drives Katie Scott and Hannah Williams’ study into the world of the artist’s things in their book, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France. To the delight of eighteenth-century specialists—and this book does assume knowledge of the primary actors and institutions of the Parisian art world of the time—fifty-five “microhistories” provide fascinating snapshots into the lives of great sculptors, painters, and printmakers through the objects they used in their artistic practice (such as the camera obscura, the crayon, the écorché, the mannequin, the palette, the pastels, the red lake, or the sketchbook), or were an intrinsic part of their lives (such as an armchair, a quill, a table, an umbrella, or a votive). Starting with surviving objects by establishing their provenance (Gilles-Marie Oppenord’s or Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s books, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box, Jean-Étienne Liotard’s gaming set, and so on), Scott and Williams brought them life from unsuspecting locations, such as a modeling stand that once belonged to the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, and which today serves as a pedestal for a statue at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. However, the authors’ study was expanded to include written records of things since lost. Scott and Williams investigated wills and after-death inventories and found the material traces of artists’ lives in letters (a request for handkerchiefs, and the permission to install a bath in the logements at the Louvre), police records (the sword that François Lemoyne used to kill himself), public notices (Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s lost porte-crayon), and works of art (the glasses that François-André Vincent wears in his self-portrait at the Louvre).

Some microhistories address more than objects: for instance, Joseph-Siffred Duplessis’ dog and a nightingale given as a gift from Catherine II of Russia to Marie-Anne Collot. In some cases, we are presented with the physical record itself, such as Johann Georg Wille’s journal or Jean-Baptiste Massé’s will. Some of these objects provide opportunities to investigate the private lives of specific artists (Hubert Robert’s baptism certificate and Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s marriage contract). Multiple entries refer to artists’ collections, including François Boucher’s shells and Charles-Joseph Natoire’s intaglios. Some give readers indications of the artists’ dressing habits, such as Louis-Michel Van Loo’s robe de chambre or Claude-Joseph Vernet’s wigs. One entry recounts Jean-François Janinet’s public failure in producing a (functioning) hot-air balloon. Other microhistories demonstrate some artists’ social standing, such as Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s impressive, decorated carriage, Joseph-Marie Vien’s long-awaited décoration of the Order of Saint Michel, and the key to a studio at the Louvre bestowed upon Pierre Peyron.

Many microhistories attest to the artists’ affective relationships, whether reflective of the pressure of a father/son filiation as suggested by Charles-Antoine Coypel’s hand-painted bed, or the strength of mother/daughter filiation in the harpsichord passed down through the Nattier family to the Tocqué family, who were related by marriage. Other microhistories illuminate the relationship between artist and patron, such as Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s order book and the watch that Jean-Antoine Coypel accepted instead of payment from a friend. In some cases, an object attests to a collective experience, such as the lanterns in the Louvre, whose maintenance fees became a point of contention between the artists who lived there. Additional microhistories offer a glimpse into the Académie—the official document box, which passed from secretary to secretary, and the funeral book of pasted together written and printed texts documenting the deaths of Academicians assembled by the concierge, Antoine Reynès (1701–22).

Artists’ Things is structured alphabetically as a meaning-neutral method of organizing the book but the authors encourage readers to approach this study from a “choose-your-own-adventure” viewpoint (3). While I admittedly began with the “water fountain’’, the first entry, the “almanac’’, provides an ideal starting point. In only six pages, Scott expertly addresses both the category of almanac as a calendar or marker of time, and a specific almanac that was purchased by Vernet on January 1, 1763, but has since gone missing. This almanac’s conspicuous absence among the many letters, journals, and order books that Vernet kept intrigues Scott, who posits that this object may have functioned both as an official order book for the painter and as a marker of the timing and pace of his own life. In beginning with an object related to time and presenting the almanac as a “hybrid object whose meanings and uses were both backward and forward facing,” Scott opens with a parallel to her and Williams’ project, which is at once backward-looking towards the eighteenth-century lives of these artists and also forward-facing highlighting the open-ended character of this book and the research it hopes to spark (23).

One of Scott and Williams’ stated goals for their study is to prioritize women and non-Académie affiliated artists. The authors emphasize their status as artists in choosing objects such as the palette, presented as a physical extension of Elisabeth Vigeé-Lebrun’s identity as a painter. Rather than being associated with traditionally “feminine” things (such as teacups, shells, or wigs) these women artists are most often linked to artists’ tools. Through learning about the burin and the engraver Renée-Elisabeth Marlié, we also learn about gender dynamics and the exploitation of male artists’ wives in their studios. Marlié, the wife of François-Bernard Lépicié, first picked up the burin working under the tutelage and direction of her husband. Despite her talent and comparable work to academicians, she was barred from pursuing her career, instead, she operated as a free studio assistant for Lépicié. She became his “second self” as one Mercure de France article stated, doubling his output, and their work is still nearly impossible to separate (60–61). However, Scott and Williams end this entry by considering the moment Marlié put down the burin—shortly after the death of her husband—noting that she was then “released from a contract of drudgery and artistic nonentity” (61). No longer just a tool in the printmaker’s hand pushing metal against metal, the burin became a tool of patriarchal oppression. 

Exploring the potential objects featured beyond what physically survives widens the scope of the book, but some entries divert too far from its primary goal. For example, the entry on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “dressing-up box” wants to “account historically for the costumes, rather than the images that index them” (112). As neither the box itself nor any actual costumes survive, Scott and Williams end up focusing on Watteau’s artistic process and his interest in drapery. The “thingness” of the dressing-up box and the costumes dissolve into the indexical trace the authors wanted to avoid.

Both Scott and Williams are aware of this potential pitfall of the object biography, and acknowledge this in their introduction, noting that this means they risk “not seeing the sugar for the sugar spoon, the snuff for the snuffbox, or the tea for the teacup” (6). In the case of the first two objects, they seem to miss out on derived meaning due to their self-imposed limitation. However, the issue in the case of both these entries is not about sugar or snuff but the absence of colonial investigation beyond sugar and snuff. In fact, Scott and Williams do see “the sugar for the sugar spoon,” examining French sugar consumption and production in their entry on François-Hubert Drouais’s silver sugar spoon as well as the artist’s personal connection to the sugar colonies through his patrons, suggesting that Drouais’ portraits, like his sugar spoon, only exist because of French colonialism. What the authors do not consider is the spoon’s material despite bringing in an additional set of silver objects—a pair of silver sugar casters in the form of enslaved plantation workers carrying sugar cane on their backs. French colonial sugar cultivation relied on enslaved individuals, and the trade for enslaved individuals relied on silver.

Another missed opportunity comes in the entry on Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s snuffbox, which the famed animal painter decorated with dogs and hunting scenes. In discussing this snuffbox, Scott and Williams briefly consider the relationship between the box and its contents through Oudry’s America as part of his series of the Four Continents, which depicts tobacco ready for shipment to Europe. However, they argue that the artist “eschewed drawing on his repertoire” (308). What they do not consider is the relationship between dogs, hunting, and enslavement in the Americas and the dedicated use of hunting dogs to recapture fugitives from slavery.

The last entry in this book is “wine,” and it provides a humorous end to a delightful book. For the art historian of the eighteenth century, this work prompts us to consider the art actors and institutions in fresh and innovative ways. We can raise our glass of wine to Scott and Williams for compiling an extraordinary and novel account of the artists’ lives, a new take on the traditional Vite mixed with the enlightened Encyclopédie. Diderot and d’Alembert would have surely enjoyed it.