Painter's Table

Eighteenth-century pastelists worked with hundreds of crayons of different colors; professional artists often kept their crayons in tables such as this one. These pieces of studio furniture provided a means of ordering the numerous tints and shades necessary to execute a composition in pastel. The drawers and compartments also held paper, cloths for cleaning the fingers, knives, small tools, and stumps of different types and sizes for producing varied effects. According to his estate inventory, Charles Antoine Coypel, whose grand double portrait hangs in this exhibition, had a table with seven drawers to house his pastels from various Parisian makers. Crayons typically were grouped by color, and one or more drawers was kept open while working so that the palette was immediately available.

This Neoclassical table, which is likely of French origin with metal fittings from Birmingham, was used by a pastelist who also was a painter, for its top compartment has a grid of tin sections for bladder colors—small balls of oil paint stored in pig bladders that were used before the invention of metal tubes about 1841. Few of these tables survive. They appear occasionally in artists’ portraits posed in the studio, such as that by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (on view in European Paintings gallery 613), in which she depicts herself and two of her pupils, one of whom, Marie Gabrielle Capet, was also a pastelist.