ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the representation of inspiration, genius, and emulation in Boucher's images of the artist at work. It analyzes a series of highly imaginative responses to art making that engage in ideal forms of artistic creativity, Enlightenment theories of genius, and the intellectual debates concerning the historic rivalry between painting and sculpture. In picturing the artist at work, Boucher draws on his experiences in the studio as a site for invention, a repository for objects, and a place to fantasize about visual and material things. Uncovering a visible trace of Boucher's studio and its contents in these works provides insight into the artist's activities. Moreover, it unearths a productive friction within Boucher's oeuvre that exposes the ways in which he resisted the temptation to reveal too much of himself in his painted and graphic imagery. Instead, his pictures of the artist at work deal with the function of the studio in all of its truths and fictions.
