In painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, staffage, pronounced "staffarge" as in French, are the human and animal figures depicted in a scene, especially a landscape, that are not the primary subject matter of the work. Before the adoption of the word into the visual arts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Staffage in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 could mean "accessories" or "decoration". The word can be used in two senses: as a general term for any figures in a work, even when they are, at least ostensibly, the main subject, and as a descriptive term for figures to whom no specific identity or story is attached, included merely for compositional or decorative reasons. In the latter sense, staffage are accessories to the scene, yet add life to the work; they provide depth to the painting and reinforce the main subject, as well as giving a clear scale to the rest of the composition.

During the Baroque, painters such as Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...

 and Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French Claude Gellée, , dit le Lorrain) Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French...

 commonly used staffage. Some landscape specialists had other painters who were more adept at painting the human form add staffage to their canvasses. Staffage figures in the second sense defined above are always un-named and should be distinguished from equally small figures with an identity, who were also used in landscapes

Landscape art

Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

 in what is technically a very similar way. However when named biblical or mythological figures are used, instead of unnamed "shepherds", "soldiers" and so on, this had the effect, according to the contemporary theory of the hierarchy of genres

Hierarchy of genres

A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value....

, in turning a landscape painting into a more prestigious, and often more valuable, history painting

History painting

History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...

, even when the figures are small and inconspicuous amid a large landscape. Such works are often given modern titles in the form "Landscape with ...".

Staffage should also be distinguished from the figures in genre painting

Genre painting

Genre works, also called genre scenes or genre views, are pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or...

s, who are also anonymous and typically from the common people, but who are the main subject of the painting.

By the 19th centuries books with patterns for hundreds of different staffage figures were published for painters to "cut and paste" into their compositions. Earlier artists had often kept drawings of such pattern figures, and the same figures often recur in several of the works of an artist, and can sometimes be traced passing to other artists.