The popular image of the artist starving in his or her garret was established in Paris in 1851, with the publication of Henri Murger’s semi-autobiographical novel, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, which Puccini would later adapt into his 1896 opera La Bohème.
Thanks to the romantic sheen which Murger and Puccini gave to this tale of bohemian life, the notion of starving for your art has become almost idealised, but the realities of such a life in the 19th century were considerably grimmer, as British author Virginia Nicholson notes in her book Among the Bohemians – Experiments in Living 1900 – 1939:
