Above my desk is a cheap nineteenth-century print of a painting by Jean-Baptiste Leloir, Claude Lorraine, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspar Poussin in the Roman Campagna (Figure 1). Claude is preparing to make a drawing, advised by Poussin, who married the sister of Gaspar Poussin, the third figure here who stands at the side. Such genre fantasies were popular at that time. They played a significant role in the process by which these two French-born men who worked in Rome became identified as French painters. We know a great deal about the practice of later French artists. There are, for example, photographs of Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro in the countryside preparing to paint together. Knowing that they worked from life, we can contrast their landscapes, and compare them to early photographs of those scenes. We take for granted that modernists often worked from life in this way. But how, from the much more limited evidence available, can we reconstruct earlier studio practices in a way that illuminates our experience of Italian art?