On Professionalism: Artists in their natural habitats

The conference at which I was going to present some of my research on professionalism in the arts has been postponed, so I stopped posting little teasers about it. But here's one more to think about until it gets rescheduled...

In in 1923 book The Art Spirit, influential teacher and painter Robert Henri discusses the conventions of the artist's studio. According to historian Sarah Burns, the studio of the late 19th century had become an important front in the creation of a professional identity for the American artist. Particularly thought the work of artists William Merritt Chase (whose studio was a frequent subject of his art, see below) the studio communicated a kind of worldliness to visiting collectors who were charmed by the artist's taste in furniture, textiles, and other miscellanea. American artists of Chase's generation (and audiences, as the Godey's Magazine image above suggests)  saw the studio as a stage on which artist identity was performed, and a large part of that identity was the demonstration of sophistication and sensitivity.

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Studio Interior, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas, 28 1/16 x 40 1/8 in. 

Henri objected to such posturing, and suggested the artist had something to learn for a more common tradesman, the barber. He writes:

A barber has an apparatus that is surprising, and all in such remarkable order. [...] An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he is generally far behind the barber in the arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should this be so? Why would a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work the making of a good picture demands? [itals. mine]

In opposition to a powerful visual metaphor for creativity, Henri tries to re-position the artist's studio as a kind of workshop, moving it away from the implicitly feminine 'boudoir' of an earlier generation. Connecting the studio with a rather humble job, Henri draws a circle around the creative act, limiting to certain tasks (after the completion of which, one can exercise thrift by cleaning up and saving unused material, he later writes, rather than wasting it by allowing it to become a 'crust of dirty, dust collecting dried up paint'). He doesn't reject the idea that the studio is a manifestation of the artist's identity; but he clearly seeks to shift it to a more masculine and industrial statement - one reflective of the climate of professionalism in which he lived.