Goethe-Gallery

Workshops and Masters

The pendant to the painter’s studio shows a sculptor’s workshop. Both paintings give an impression of the work and the space, but also of the artists’ self-conception around 1750. Organized into guilds, they saw themselves as craftsmen and -women, their position thoroughly respectable. As the painting shows, a sculpture was produced in several steps, from the drawing to the plaster model to the execution in marble, with antiquity offering the noblest example.