studio
Social Sitting
Working from a sitter who is talking, being read to, or in animated conversation—rather than holding a static pose.
What it actually is
The conventional portrait sitting is silent. A sitter freezes in a pose and the painter tries to capture the surface. Repin rejected this. He had friends read aloud during sittings, encouraged the sitter to talk, filled the studio with conversation. His argument was that the living character of a person only shows up in speech and thought, not in held silence. A painter who works this way catches something a static pose cannot: the micro-shifts that make the face actually belong to that person.
Painters who used this
Ilya Repin1844–1930 · Russia
The Peredvizhniki history painter and portraitist who worked from zenith-lit studios, standing, from long social sittings, and painted monumental scenes from years of field observation.
John Singer Sargent1856–1925 · United States
The late-nineteenth-century portraitist who worked in sight-size from a north-lit London studio, standing, in pure oil color without medium—placing each mark from six to twelve feet away and scraping the canvas to the ground when a passage failed.
Related techniques
Zenith Light
Top-down overhead light from a glass-paneled ceiling, producing shadowless, even illumination across large canvases.
Standing Practice
Painting while standing, on the belief that sitting flattens the energy of the mark and the range of the arm.
North-Light Studio
A window or skylight facing north, giving cool, consistent indirect light that never contains direct sun.
Sight-Size Method
Placing the canvas next to the model at the same scale and viewing distance, so a mark on the canvas can be judged against the subject 1:1 from several paces back.
Monumental Plein Air
Painting large finished canvases outdoors in direct sunlight rather than making small studies to be finished in a studio.