Abstract
This thesis examines Victorian images of famous artists’ studio-homes as charged performative spaces at the intersection of the public and private spheres. The exclusivity of studio-homes made them sites of privileged access. Analysing examples of both famous and now lesser-known artists, active between 1860-1914, I show how a photograph intermediates between the artist’s private body, and the art-viewing public to increase fame. Photography was a dominant and widely circulated tool of celebrification (the process of turning oneself into a celebrity) in the nineteenth century. This thesis argues that artists create a performative public persona in photographs, mobilised through their curation of the studio space and management of their social networks. I show how photographs allowed artists to establish themselves in the minds of their contemporary audience by acting out a performative version of their art practice, to enrich a legacy they hoped would endure within the art historical canon. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from Performance Theory, Photographic Theory, and the theories of Haunting and Spectrality, I demonstrate that the public image of the Victorian artist was carefully constructed within the stage set of a meticulously curated studio-home and distributed to a wider audience through photographic remediation. This thesis places the Victorian artist as a subject for Celebrity Studies, with ongoing implications for our present-day construction of fame.