ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the invention and use of portable studios by British landscape painters in the nineteenth century. It considers in particular the portable studios used by British artist and critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834–1894) and German-born artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849–1914). These studios were designed to be transported, assembled, and disassembled in the landscape. In addition to offering a solution to the challenges of outdoor painting, such as the risk of unfavourable weather and the time required to travel to painting sites, portable studios facilitated the direct observation of the natural world. Their plate-glass windows provided a frame for the landscape outside, transforming these studios into optical instruments. This chapter considers how the publication of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–1860) revised existing standards that dictated how artists should encounter nature, leading to innovations in studio design that reconfigured the tripartite relation between artists, the environment, and the studio. Ruskin’s insistence upon truth to nature in visual art presented artists with the challenge of visually discerning an abstract concept in the material world. This chapter demonstrates that some nineteenth-century British artists responded by reimagining the space through which they perceived and represented the world: the studio.
