A conservator at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum was recently astonished to find a tiny grasshopper stuck in the paint of Van Gogh’s ‘Olive Trees’ (1889). The discovery would not have surprised Van Gogh, who complained to his brother Theo in 1885: ‘I must have picked up a good hundred flies or more off the four canvases that you’ll be getting.’
On the evidence of a new exhibition of drawings on the theme of Artists at Work at the Courtauld Gallery, insects are the least of the plein-air painter’s problems: the 19th-century protagonist of Eduard Gehbe’s ‘The startled painter’ has been sent flying by a passing roebuck. Animals aside, there’s the physical discomfort to contend with. Jan de Bisschop’s ‘Two Artists drawing a bust’ (c.1660), hunched over their sketchbooks on a hard stone floor, have sensibly brought cushions, but Hubert Robert’s ‘Artist drawing beside a statue of Jupiter’ (1762) is perched on the sharp edge of a wheelbarrow with only a foreshortened view up Jupiter’s toga.
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