Studio in the Rue de Furstenberg

A green armchair stands empty, a paint box lies open on the floor, and pictures crowd the walls almost to the ceiling. In Studio in the Rue de Furstenberg, Frédéric Bazille makes a working room his subject without placing a painter inside it. The canvas, dated 1865–66 by the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, is an oil painting measuring 81.2 × 65 cm. ^[1] Its modest scale suits the encounter it offers: we seem to have stepped into a room whose occupant has briefly gone elsewhere.

The painting combines the practical and the pictorial. A stove supplies heat; chairs offer somewhere to sit; the scattered equipment is ready for work. Yet these ordinary things also establish a carefully balanced arrangement of uprights, diagonals and patches of colour. The room is both a place where paintings were made and a painting through which Bazille examined what that place looked like.

When Bazille lived at Furstenberg

Bazille was already established at Furstenberg by the letter to his father dated 6 January 1865 in the Musée Fabre transcription. He supplied the address as 6 place Furstenberg and reported the arrival of bedding for his iron bed. Occupation of the address therefore belongs to the turn of 1864–65, rather than the beginning of 1866. The date of moving in and the date of painting the interior are separate questions. ^[2]

The canvas itself has received slightly different dates. The National Gallery of Art's 2017 exhibition checklist listed it as 1865. Fabre's present record uses the broader range 1865–66, without assigning the painting to a particular month. Neither the warm stove nor the absence of people establishes an exact occasion. ^{[3] [1]}

Furstenberg mattered at a point when Bazille was committing himself to painting. Michel Hilaire places the search for the studio after Bazille's abandonment of medical studies in 1864 and describes its importance to a young artist still dependent on parental support. ^[4] The room offered the material basis for that commitment: space to keep pictures, prepare equipment and return to work. It should not be judged by the standards of a grand public studio intended to impress patrons.

Nor does this corner give a complete plan of the accommodation. A doorway partly covered by green fabric hints at another space. Furnishings are cut off at the right edge, while the left edge interrupts a large framed picture. These boundaries make the room feel inhabited beyond the limits of the canvas. Bazille shows enough to establish a world of work without pretending to inventory everything within it.

How the room holds together

The most insistent vertical is the corner where the two walls meet. It rises behind the green chair, carrying the eye towards the high, dark upper wall. To its left, the door frame and the edge of the stove recess introduce further uprights. Against this structure, frames tilt, the tablecloth hangs unevenly and the chair angles towards the foreground. The room has order, but its objects do not obey a rigid grid.

The distinction between upper and lower wall is equally important. The lower zone is a muted reddish brown, while the high plaster shifts through grey, ochre and deep shadow. Pictures occupy the boundary and extend above it. A small portrait and two little framed views hang closer to the table; larger canvases spread across the higher wall. The effect is of images gradually taking possession of the architecture.

Near the top, two figure studies lean at different angles. Below them, brighter landscape passages create an irregular band across the room. At the far left, the broad gilded frame projects into our view and makes the wall beyond the canvas seem to continue. The crowded hanging contrasts with the relatively open floor. Our eye moves between the density above and the room available below for a person to walk or set up equipment.

The green armchair provides a middle point between those zones. Its curved reddish wooden frame remains legible against the darker upholstery, and its projecting legs establish its position on the floor. Behind it, long slender rods lean upwards. The rounded red chair farther right is partly obscured and cut by the edge. One chair is clearly presented as an object; the other belongs to the surrounding accumulation of things.

There is no single central object equivalent to a portrait sitter. The armchair attracts attention, but the open box pulls the eye down and forward; the bright landscapes pull it up; the heater anchors the left edge. The viewer has to travel through the composition, as attention shifts between objects used for different activities.

Light, heat and working things

No window appears in the view. We recognise illumination through its effects: the pale floor, a brighter strip beside the table, the lit edges of furniture and the readable surfaces of the paintings. The upper corner darkens considerably, but the room is not uniformly dim. Bazille uses changes within subdued colour to distinguish wall from wall and object from surrounding shadow.

The floor is especially active. Broad variations of warm grey and ochre keep it from becoming a blank interval beneath the furniture. Shadows extend from the chair and the open box, giving these objects weight. The darker floor beside the heater helps to make the space at left feel recessed. Above, the wall's uneven painted surface provides a different kind of variation, broken by rectangular pictures rather than by cast shadows.

The stove is small in relation to the wall behind it, yet its red glow is difficult to overlook. Black and grey rings interrupt its vertical cylinder, while orange appears near the bottom. These warm notes find quieter echoes in the door surround, chair frame and reddish lower walls. The heater is therefore useful twice over: it makes the room habitable and contributes a concentrated passage of colour.

The letter from January 1865 gives a vivid context for such an object. Bazille reported severe cold, alongside the small domestic arrangements that were making the new address usable. ^[2] That account helps us understand the need for heating, although it does not prove that the painting records the particular winter day described in his letter.

In the foreground, the open paint box is shown at an angle, its upright lid and shallow base forming a small construction on the floor. Thin implements extend beside it. This is a different sort of rectangular object from the framed paintings overhead: a container for the means of making pictures, placed beneath the results of that activity. Its low position also asks us to look down, as someone entering the room would have to do.

The table offers another register of use. Its dark green covering drops over the edges, and small pale papers and upright utensils break the line of its top. A low stool stands nearby. The white marks on the table are among the sharpest light accents in the lower room, while the cloth establishes a colour relationship with the chair. Writing and painting belong to the same interior, connected through objects rather than through an enacted scene.

What can be recognised on the walls?

The pictures are clear enough to show different kinds of subject, but they are not all clear enough to name. We can distinguish a little portrait, coastal or landscape views, foliage, flowers and figure studies. Their varied sizes and frames make the wall resemble a working collection rather than a formal exhibition.

Schulman associates several landscapes with Monet and discusses possible works by Bazille, while retaining uncertainty about other pictures. His catalogue is particularly cautious about identifying the large marine at the left as Bazille's Beach at Sainte-Adresse. ^[5] It is better to preserve these differences in certainty than to give each rectangle a definitive title. Some pictures are represented through only a handful of small colour shapes.

Their role in the composition remains apparent even where their identity is uncertain. The pale sky and open ground in a central landscape interrupt the surrounding brown wall. A darker wooded scene stretches across the right. Above, the figure studies introduce small areas of flesh and red clothing. Within a room shown without occupants, painted figures supply a remote human presence.

These images also complicate the relationship between indoors and outdoors. We are enclosed by walls, but views of sky, coast and vegetation punctuate those walls. The landscape is present as something already painted, kept nearby and available to be looked at again. The studio holds the results of excursions as well as the tools for future work.

One should resist reading its restrained furnishings as a diagnosis of Bazille's character. Schulman brings together earlier interpretations of the studios as autobiographical and austere. ^[5] The visible evidence supports a more limited conclusion: Bazille chose a room with few large furnishings and many pictures. An unoccupied chair can suggest pause or expectation, but it cannot tell us whether its owner was naturally solitary or melancholy.

A shared address and an outward-looking practice

Although the picture is empty of people, the surviving correspondence makes the life around it social. In the January letter, Bazille told his father that Monet woke him in the mornings and that his days were occupied with painting from the living model in Monet's studio. He explained his winter programme in a sentence translated here from the French: “I must paint a great many figures this winter.” This was preparation for spring and summer work in the countryside. ^[2]

The distinction matters when looking at an interior apparently so far removed from outdoor painting. For Bazille, practising figures under cover could serve work to be undertaken outside. The studio and the countryside belonged to a connected programme. The paintings on the wall and the equipment on the floor give that relationship a visible form, although they do not illustrate a particular passage of the letter.

His request that a parasol and folding stool be sent with his pictures further joins the Paris room to future excursions. ^[2] Portable equipment could leave the studio and return to it; finished or unfinished canvases could do the same. The room was a base from which to work, rather than the boundary of his interests.

For another view of the friendship with Monet, The Improvised Field Hospital offers a useful comparison. Listed in the 2017 checklist as an August 1865 painting, it shows Monet reclining in a furnished room after injury. ^[3] There, furniture and small objects surround a visible person. At Furstenberg, objects must establish the sense of daily life by themselves. The comparison makes the empty chair more noticeable without requiring us to imagine someone who is not painted there.

Furstenberg, Visconti and La Condamine

Bazille returned to the studio interior in Studio of the Rue Visconti, dated May 1867 in the National Gallery of Art checklist. ^[3] This is a different room, organised around long floorboards, a bench, a small fireplace and canvases hung or propped against the walls. The open stretch of floor draws us towards the far wall. The vertical canvas at the left makes the working equipment seem close enough to touch.

The Furstenberg painting, by contrast, turns our attention upwards as well as inwards. Its high pictures, dark corner and irregular hanging occupy much of the view. Visconti gives greater emphasis to the route across a narrow room. Both paintings allow furnishings and pictures to stand for activity without showing someone carrying it out, but they solve different spatial problems.

In Bazille's Studio, Rue La Condamine, the room becomes a setting for people looking at art and making music. The high window, stairway and broad floor create a more expansive arrangement. There are still pictures to study and an empty upholstered chair in the foreground, but the relationship between objects and occupants has changed: social exchange is now visible.

Technical examination adds a revealing qualification. Bruno Mottin reports that the La Condamine interior was initially painted without its figures; the people and the Voltaire chair were introduced later. ^[6] Bazille could thus develop the social life of a studio within a composition already under way. That finding concerns the later canvas; it does not establish an equivalent sequence of revisions at Furstenberg.

Seen together, the three pictures show how adaptable a familiar subject could be. A studio could be described through its stored work, the distance across its floor or the people meeting inside it. Furstenberg remains distinctive for the closeness of its corner and the way its many separate pictures become part of one larger painted interior.

Delacroix and the painting's museum life

Musée Fabre locates Bazille's accommodation above Delacroix's former studio and interprets the glowing stove as an homage to the older painter's studio imagery. ^[1] It is an evocative connection, although Schulman notes that the attribution of the particular studio picture associated with Delacroix has itself been questioned. ^[5] The comparison can illuminate a tradition of intimate working interiors without proving that every furnishing was chosen as a reference to an earlier work.

The canvas later belonged to Eugène Leenhardt and passed by descent to Mme Georges Marchand, née Leenhardt, before its sale to Musée Fabre in 1985. ^[5] The museum records the acquisition as a purchase by the city with regional acquisition-fund assistance and the cooperation of the Marchand-Leenhardt family. Its inventory number is 85.5.3. ^[1]

Its exhibition history includes the Montpellier retrospective of 1927, the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition of 1978, and the 2016–17 retrospective shown in Montpellier, Paris and Washington. ^[1] In those wider accounts of Bazille, this small interior supplies something the large figure paintings cannot: a concentrated view of the ordinary surroundings of work.

The picture rewards a final look at its lower edge. The box is open, the chair is available and the floor leaves room to move. Nothing announces a completed performance. Above this temporary pause, paintings already fill the walls. Bazille makes the studio's accumulated work and its continuing possibilities visible in the same quiet view.