The Study

Staccatos, teapots, and harems

The terms derived from the French word étude (study) are used universally, and not only by artists and art historians. In schools of music, études are helpful for practising a legato, staccato, or spiccato, or when developing the swiftness of the fingers. An étude focuses on a particular technical skill and provides material for perfecting it.

Young actors act out short episodes called scene studies in which they can be asked to portray anything, like a teapot, a flamingo, a ghost, or a balcony of a castle. Some scene studies help actors in learning how to adlib and be quick to respond when the performance suddenly runs off the track. In short, studies are for learning and memorising things.

In creative writing, a study is an exercise where you are given a philological task: to describe a landscape using only metaphors, or to think up a fictional creature, or to show the characters' mood through their behaviour. No plot, no suspense, no progress of events — just a drill for imagination.

Endgame studies are composed to train chess players. The arrangement of the pieces on the board represents an intermediate stage of a chess game. The player’s task is to find how to conclude the game in a particular way.

The Pope, Pushkin, and Marie de’ Medici

Perhaps, of all genres, likeness to nature is most important in portraiture. A gnarled tree or a gallant and muscular steed, do not care how you picture them. But a portrayed person has certain opinions and the right to pay nothing to the painter if the portrait is a failure.
To spare a model the torturous hours of sitting for a portrait (especially when painting a pope, or a fidgety infanta, or a queen of France), a Renaissance or Baroque artist made but a quick study of face and body individualities. Besides, quite often the monarch’s features captured in the study needed further, and sometimes considerable, modifications — for courtesy reasons, and to conform to an artistic canon.

Speaking of studies and drafts, both are elements of an artist’s preparation for painting a picture. Their purposes are quite different, though. A study is a snapshot of life made to understand an object’s behaviour, structure, colour, shape. While a draft is something more speculative, it is the painter’s vision of the composition, subject, layout of the main elements in the future work. A study is an impression and emotion, a draft is reasoning and knowledge.

Chopin, Stanislavski, and the Impressionists

In all arts (except chess, as it is not classed as an art), between the 1850s and the early 20th century, there were almost simultaneous changes in the status of the study.

Frédéric Chopin was the first who composed short études (2 to 5 minutes each) that, although in conformity with the conventions of the genre, and still based on a limited number of playing techniques, were nevertheless highly emotional and difficult to play.

Later appeared études that were originally far beyond the limits of five-finger exercises, by Claude Debussy, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns.

A veritable revolution in the name of the study took place in painting. Critics patronisingly termed the revolutionaries the impressionists. Everything that had been considered essential for a study — emotion, a momentary impression, transient, in-between states of nature, changes of mood, the model’s awkward posture — now became essential for art in general.

‘A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape!' exclaimed Louis Leroy, a critic. He was indignant at the outrageous incompleteness and the amateurish lack of subject in the pictures he saw at the First Impressionist exhibition. Academicians and critics believed that painting a picture should be a long and hard job, though with no visible traces of the effort. In their eyes, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and artists like them were nothing but impostors who displayed their hasty sketches in the gallery and called them pictures, without even bothering to spread paint over some patches of bare canvas.

Claude Monet painted series of pictures, working on 20 to 30 canvases in parallel and trying to register the faintest changes in nature. He intentionally ignored, even defied the traditional principles of composition. In his works, the main character could seem to be tumbling out of the frame

It has always been important for artists and art collectors how to frame their works of art. We can paraphrase Shakespeare and say,

“What’s in a frame? That which we call a picture
In an improper frame will look less nice.”

Or, perhaps, the picture’s message will be obscured by too ornate or too plain framing. Here, we present a retrospective journey into the history of framing and its evolution, with illustrations and an expert’s commentary. Read more

, the figures could herd together at one side of the canvas, leaving a gaping void at the opposite side. Towards the end of the 19th century, there remained only one criterion, very fine and incalculable, to distinguish between a study and a finished painting — the ability to raise emotion, which was only characteristic of a completed picture, not a study.

In the early 1900s, Konstantin Stanislavsky introduced the term scene study into drama training. For the whole Western theatre, it marked a revolutionary era. His studies (with tasks like keeping silence in a natural way, or creating a certain atmosphere, or manifesting a state of health, or using metaphors) were aimed at making actors less rational, at stimulating their spirit and emotion.

The Pope again

Paul Cezanne, while working on The Large Bathers in the 20th century, did not make studies of nude models. He joked that at his age one had an obligation not to make a woman undress to paint her. But the sketches he made as a young man were quite enough for the purpose — in fact, he did not need any models. He just strolled about, breathed the air, and watched the places he knew by heart.

Thus, in the 20th century, a study, though still called by its name, is void of its essence. Now, it can be made not from life, but from another picture. Often, it is a mere play upon genres, with no other rules, but formal similarity.