Monday, April 30, 2018

Mannequins in the Studio - Part V

Joseph Albrier
Studio Interior
1822
oil on canvas
private collection

"In the early part of the century, paintings in which the living model is juxtaposed and contrasted with the artist's mannequin are for the most part mild-mannered reflections on the theme of the artful and the artificial that maintain, and in some cases reinforce, the distinction between animate and inanimate 'sitters'.  In Joseph Albrier's decorous and remarkably well-ordered studio interior, for example, the seated female figure – very possibly the artist's wife – looks away momentarily from her book into the shadowy depths of the studio, while a small, apparently female mannequin on the opposite side of the canvas stares blankly through a studio window onto a world of reality to which it/she can never aspire.  Both figures are clothed or draped, and act as repoussoirs that frame the display of paintings and sketches on the wall behind, some of which can be identified as by Albrier himself.  Amidst these are antique busts and plaster casts that may have inspired some of the artist's paintings: on the left, completing the trilogy of female heads, a plaster cast of Aphrodite acts as a pivotal exemplar of female beauty; on the right, a statuette of Mercury and – placed prominently between them – a bust of Homer.  The theme of sightlessness is developed in the death mask hanging high on the cupboard door and in the hollow eye sockets of the skull, both forms of vanitas and memento mori that promote a reflection not only on death, but on the life that separates the living model from the mannequin."

Marie-Amélie Cogniet
Studio Interior
1831
oil on canvas
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

"The young model [in Marie-Amélie Cogniet's studio interior] appears to take a rest from posing, amusing herself by playing with the absent painter's articulated wooden maquette, for her a substitute doll; the chalk circles on the tiled floor indicate where she should reposition herself when work resumes.  Around her, the painter's materials – painting box, palette, brushes, portfolio of drawings and solitary pieces of chalk balanced on the stool – are spread out, suggesting the he, or she, has broken off in mid-composition."

Heinrich von Rustige
The Farmer in the Artist's Studio
ca. 1839
oil on canvas
Stiftung Sammlung Volmer, Wuppertal

"In Germany, representations of artists' studios became more numerous during the first part of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that some authors have attributed to the increasing tendency for artists to work independently of church and aristocratic commissions and explore new self-referential and domestic subject matter.  Outwardly, many seem little more than rumbustious pictorial farces, or excuses to target the growing market for such scenes, yet many thinly disguise more programmatic aesthetic intentions.  Heinrich von Rustige's comic caper showing a farmer in the artist's studio, painted around 1839, is a case in point.  In it, the faggot-bearing peasant – who could have walked out of one of the landscapes of Düsseldorf school in which Rustige trained – confronts the 'reality' of the artist's studio, perhaps mirroring the painter's own disorientation when first experiencing the unadulterated natural world.  The painter himself is again absent, but leaves markers of his work in the palette and brush on the floor, the sketches hanging on the screen, the canvas on the easel and the empty bottle beneath it.  Overawed by the resplendent uniform and decorated trappings of a military presence, the peasant doffs his hat while the child – presumably his son – tries to hide behind him, horrified by the headless apparition, and the dog sniffs the detached painted head on the floor.  . . .  On a simple reading, Rustige's painting reasserts that seeing is not always believing, but it also signals his renunciation of both history painting and the mechanics traditionally used in its making: for all his uneducated naїveté, the peasant is a much nobler, because a much more natural, figure, Rustige appears to suggest.  The mannequin thus became a convenient scapegoat, a simulated personification of all that a new generation of painters came to feel was wrong with academic painting and the aesthetic beliefs it stood for." 

Ferdinand Tellgmann
In the Studio
ca. 1834
oil on canvas
Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel

"Like Rustige, the deaf-mute painter from Kassel, Ferdinand Tellgmann, places nature at the centre of his artistic endeavours, albeit in less overtly comical guise.  The compositional middle ground of his studio interior is dominated by a large landscape painting on an easel; behind, two other painters work assiduously by the daylight falling through the open window; contributing to a sense of overriding seriousness of purpose among the three artist-comrades.  Plaster casts after antique sculpture – symbols of conventional artistic training – are again relegated to the top of a cupboard in the rear of the painting.  At the same time as other painters in Kassel were ordering expensively crafted mannequins from Paris in precisely these years, Tellgmann covers his with a white sheet, perhaps simply to protect it from dust and damage, but in doing so also transforming it into the ghostly, awkwardly-posed relic of an academic art that has implicitly had its day."

Wilhelm von Kaulbach
The Struggle against Pedantry
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

"By far the most notable polemical intervention involving a mannequin in these years, Wilhelm von Kaulbach's Die Bekämpfung des Zopfes ('The Struggle against Pedantry'), was also its most public and parodic. Originally a member of the Düsseldorf school and a pupil of Nazarene painter, Peter von Cornelius, Kaulbach followed his master to Munich when the latter became Director of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, a post he himself came to occupy in 1849.  As Court Painter to Ludwig I from 1837, Kaulbach was commissioned between 1847 and 1854 to paint twelve frescoes for the exterior of the Neue Pinakothek, the first public museum in Europe to be exclusively devoted to modern art, erected at the king's personal expense between 1846 and 1853.  The frescoes (all now destroyed by damp) were intended to represent the achievements of contemporary German art and, by extension, to celebrate the king as the greatest patron of the visual arts of the day.  One of the first in the series, Kaulbach's pedantic allegory was something of a heavy-handed – not to mention ungenerous – satire.  On the left, clearly in a defensive position, are the representatives of the intellectual academic tradition, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Danish painter Asmus Carstens and sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and the theoretician J.J. Winckelmann, all of whom are protected by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.  On the right, mounted on the winged Pegasus, an emblem of inspiration, Kaulbach portrays his portly one-time teacher Cornelius alongside his Nazarene brothers, Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, who tugs at a reluctant bearded figure precariously perched on a tortoise, Kaulbach himself.  Between the two opposing camps the Three Graces cower imprisoned behind Pegasus' forelegs, while the bewigged figure of Gérard de Lairesse apparently lies in 'an eternal sleep' clutching in one hand some of his influential publications . . . and in the other, the mannequin which he considered the 'artful implement' so necessary to artistic practice." 

Giorgio de Chirico
Hector and Andromache
1917
oil on canvas
private collection

"De Chirico's wooden figures and their androgynous forms reflect the artist's state of mind during the war years as he considered innocence and despair: 'to live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and disappointed, realize they are empty'.  . . .  With their featureless tailor's dummy forms and classical settings whose arches and shadows are more psychological than architectural, de Chirico explored the often inhuman face of modernity.  As he wrote in Zeuxis the Explorer (1918), he was haunted by severed heads in shop windows: 'The papier mâché head in a hairdresser's window, severed in the dubious heroism of dark, prehistoric days, seared my heart and mind like a recurrent song. The demons of the city were preparing a way for me . . .'"

Oskar Kokoschka
Woman in blue
1919
oil on canvas
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Oskar Kokoschka
Self-portrait at the easel
1922
oil on canvas
Leopold Collection, Vienna

"Oskar Kokoschka also paved the way for Surrealism and its obsession with both the hand-crafted doll and the shop mannequin  . . .  the doll became an intriguing theatrical prop in his art.  Kokoschka's doll was, famously, also linked to his great muse Alma Mahler, with whom he fell passionately in love in 1912.  Their affair ended two years later, and after the war he commissioned a life-size doll, modelled on Alma, from the avant-garde dollmaker Hermine Moos."

Sándor Bortnyik
The New Adam
1924
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Sándor Bortnyik
The New Eve
1924
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

"Hungarian artist Sándor Bortnyik turned to the mannequin as a sign of disillusion.  . . .  With their black-and-white costumes, urban settings and biblical names, these figures seem to signal the dawn of a new age.  However, Adam is a wound up puppet and Eve a faceless automaton whose rigidity is underlined by the tailor's dummy behind her.  . . .  Painted while Bortnyik was living in Weimar and exposed to Walter Gropius' Bauhaus aesthetic and Theo van Doesberg's De Stijl seminars, both works reflect the 'total work of art' to which those movements aspired.  Further, their abstracted forms are influenced by the contemporary ideas, drawings and ballet costumes of Oskar Schlemmer, who changed the nature of dance with his Triadic ballet (1922) and was the head of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop from 1923 to 1929.  In an essay of 1924 Schlemmer described mechanization as an 'emblem of our time' and accused utilitarians of having 'gone a long way to killing utopia'.  Correspondingly, Bortnyik's 'new' Adam and Eve are emblems of Weimar's 'new objectivity': devoid of individuality and emotion, the pair are intended as a warning for the spectator."

Alan Beeton
Posing
1929
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Alan Beeton
Reposing
1929
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Alan Beeton
Decomposing
1929
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Alan Beeton began in academia, as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, before training as a painter, first at the Colarossi Academy in Paris, and later for a short time with Walter Sickert.  After serving in the infantry during the First World War, during which he was attached to the French Camouflage Section, he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy only in 1923, when he was in his forties.  At the end of the decade he produced a group of thoughtful, curious and often witty paintings, featuring his own lay figure as the central protagonist, which, for all the latter's lifelessness, have a remarkable sense of vitality and conviction.  None of the series has more than a single word, descriptive title, so restricting interpretative or narrative readings, although the mannequin's painted persona often exudes a powerful sense of character, expressed mainly through a quirky arrangement of pose, gesture and the occasional prop."

Paul Delvaux
Nude with Mannequin
1947
oil on canvas
private collection

"Paul Delvaux's Nude with Mannequin (1947) uses a buxom dressmaker's dummy to intimate sexual violence.  In this painting the Belgian artist juxtaposes a nubile, elongated nude with an upright dressmaker's dummy, its neck swathed in some crocheted cloth which tumbles down behind it like a net.  The nude is classically posed and, as with so many of Delvaux's females, recalls the languid odalisques of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).  In contrast, the dummy takes on a phallic role, as it is strategically positioned opposite the nude's exposed sex and casts a dark, unnatural shadow.  Details in the painting – notably the evening sky, train, steam, and pillars – exemplify Delvaux's use of dream symbolism to evoke the Oedipal scenario."

– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Mannequins in the Studio - Part IV

Paul Huot
Female Mannequin
ca. 1816
wood, metal, horsehair, wax, silk, cotton, painted papier mâché
Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel

"Interestingly, Barillet gives barely a passing mention to one of the most sought-after mannequin-makers in Europe, Paul Huot, except to say that he followed in the footsteps of Ansiaume.  Beyond this, nothing is known of Huot's life, but the reputation of his extraordinary mannequins assured his posthumous fame.  By 1790, Huot's life-sized, stuffed figures were already being sold as far afield as St. Petersburg, and in 1817 the little-known genre painter August von der Embde (1780-1862) also had one sent to Kassel from Paris at the significant cost of 1,000 francs (transport included).  After passing through the possession of the artist's painter-descendants, this figure was eventually given to the museum at Kassel, and although it has undergone various phases of restoration, the original is comparatively well-preserved.  X-rays taken at the time of restoration show a complex, if somewhat irregular construction in wood and metal, upholstered in what appears to be a mixture of horsehair and tow, covered with a double layer of cotton stockinette.  The exposed area of the décolleté is made of wax, presumably to achieve optimal simulation of the flesh, while the papier mâché head is pierced with holes so as to allow a wig or hat to be attached; further holes around the neck would have enabled the costume to be securely fitted to its inanimate support.  Huot proudly signed his creation in large letters on the upper part of the throat section, hidden by the head, once fitted.  'Madame Huot', as she is affectionately known, was delivered to the owner complete with a three-page pamphlet of instructions for use, written in French and German by Heinrich von Bezold, an artists' supplier who in 1830 procured a second mannequin for the sculptor Johann Martin von Wagner.  The booklet contains such important advice as how to mount the mannequin on its stand and fix the arms and thighs in position, how to cover it to protect it from dust and, in a final paragraph, how to make the figure pose like the Venus de' Medici."

T.B. Bitter
In the Studio
ca. 1820-30
oil on canvas
Musée Carnavalet, Paris

"The little-known French painter T.B. Bitter's self-portrait in his own studio presents a highly romantic view of the artist's working environment.  Dressed in a dapper cravat and morning coat, a loaded palette in his hand, the painter sits before an open fire, its warmth radiating out onto his trouser legs.  His outward glance invites the viewer to contemplate the picturesque clutter of the studio: a pile of books, bottle and glass on the table beside him, a vase with a solitary flower on the elaborate mantelpiece behind, and walls closely hung with anatomical plasters, framed and unframed portraits and sketches which we take to be his.  On a large easel on the right, partially covered, is Bitter's painting The Clemency of François I, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1819; opposite, two young female students attentively draw what appears to be a model in the centre of the room, fashionably dressed in an elegant satin gown with white gloves, a matching feather hat and voluminous red shawl.  However, the lavish detail of her dress serves more than a decorative purpose, for it is with this figure that Bitter wishes to have a little fun.  A closer look – which he so actively encourages us to take – shows that the figure is in fact a well-padded mannequin perfectionné, not dissimilar to those made by Paul Huot, a maker who, as we have seen, was in particular demand in just those years." 

Gustave Courbet
Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine
1856
oil on canvas
Petit Palais, Paris

"Misdirected realism was one of the numerous criticisms levelled at Gustave Courbet's painting Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, his first genre scene representing contemporary urban life, when it was shown at the Salon in 1857.  The painting famously proved controversial for the lascivious poses of the skimpily clad young women, too readily identified as grisettes, or part-time prostitutes, but it also disappointed Courbet's supporters who considered it an inexplicable diversion from the more complex, socially engaged realist subjects he had painted up to that point.  However, focusing on modern city life and modern women gave Courbet the opportunity to indulge in painting once of the facets that best defined the contemporary parisienne: her dress, or, in this case, her equally fashionable under-dress.  . . .  [In a caricature of this painting, Félix Nadar drew attention] to the unnatural and graceless quality of the figures, splayed out awkwardly on the riverbank like disarticulated artists' or dressmakers' dummies, their bland expressionless faces detached from each other and their surroundings: woman and mannequin are conflated – both display fashion, and are at the same time themselves goods on display." 

Gustave Courbet
Young Ladies of the Village
1851
oil on canvas
Leeds Museums and Galleries

Earlier in the decade, when Courbet had exhibited Young Ladies of the Village, the figures were similarly said to have "the air of crudely carved and shabbily dressed dolls, placed in an equally unrealistic landscape setting populated by cattle on wheels that seemed 'a world apart'."  

Gustave Courbet
The Artist's Studio
1854-55
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

". . . there is no documentary evidence that Courbet used mannequins for any of these paintings, although one – clearly padded like a Huot-type figure, if not necessarily perfectionné  appears prominently in the left-hand side of his painting The Artist's Studio: A Real Allegory Determining Seven Years of My Life as an Artist.  Suspended behind the painter's easel and half in shadow, the mannequin is shown in the contorted pose of a St Sebastian figure, with a piece of drapery loosely thrown over its forearm; seated to its left, apparently dozing, is an undertaker in a top hat, and between them a skull, described by Courbet as 'a death's head on a newspaper'; a trilogy of lifelessness that passes from the suspended animation of sleep to the inanimate mannequin and the definitively  and allegorically  dead.  Boime has suggested that we are to understand the presence of the mannequin as an allusion to the demise of classicism, but, by extension, it might also be considered a condemnation of the stultifying effect of its overuse in academic art; certainly, Courbet places it among the figures he identifies as representing what might be roughly described as his opponents, 'the other world of trivial life, the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited, the exploiters, people who live from death'.  Yet a photograph by Eugène Feyen of Courbet's studio in Ornans [below] taken in 1864 and showing a life-size mannequin slumped in the far corner of the room between a mirror and a cabinet, amongst piles of unframed canvases, might contradict, or at least qualify, this reading.  But for the evidence of the breasts, it would be tempting to assume it was the mannequin that earlier 'posed' for St Sebastian; however, it appears that Courbet owned one of each sex."  

Eugène Feyen
Courbet's Studio in Ornans
1864
photograph
Institut Gustave Courbet, Ornans

Frederic Leighton
Cimabue's celebrated Madonna
1853-55
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Frederic Leighton
The Feigned Death of Juliet
1856-58
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Frederic Leighton
The Invocation
ca. 1889
oil on canvas
private collection

"For devotees such as Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy from 1878 to his death in 1896, the lay figure was an essential aid to rendering the extravagant, highly decorative and supremely non-naturalistic drapery that became something of a trademark of his paintings from the 1870s.  As Daniel Robbins has shown, Leighton took infinite pains in preparing his voluminous and elaborately disposed drapery prior to painting.  This involved laying the fabric out on the floor and supporting the folds with pads of cotton wool, or – following Renaissance practice using small figurines – dipping the material into a plaster mix that was then laid on the life-size mannequin, so that the shape of the folds was preserved as the plaster dried.  However, at times not even the most sophisticated lay figure could give Leighton the results he needed.  In 1889, for his painting The Invocation, he commissioned the promising young sculptor Henry Peagram (1862-1937) to make a full-scale model in clay in a pose too physically demanding for a living model to retain for the requisite time, and which he found could not be adequately replicated by the mannequin.  This arrangement fixed the fabric in place long enough for him to be able to reproduce the extraordinarily subtle effects of white light filtering through a white veil which – notional subject apart – lay at the aesthetic heart of the painting." 

John Everett Millais
The Black Brunswicker
1860
oil on canvas
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool

"Moral scruples . . . intervened in the case of Millais' most famous use of a lay figure, for his painting of The Black Brunswicker.  As models for his protagonists' features, Millais took Charles Dickens' daughter Kate, and a private in the Life Guards, whom he had personally selected for his good looks.  Propriety dictated that two unacquainted members of the opposite sexes could not assume so intimate a pose in real life, so the models sat at different times and a mannequin was called in, leaving the Life Guard to embrace a (presumably stuffed) lay figure, while his 'fair lady', Miss Dickens, 'leant on the bosom of a man of wood'.  . . .  Generally a fast worker, Millais laboured over The Black Brunswicker for three months, and the huge popular and financial recognition he received when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860 suggested his efforts had not been in vain.  . . .  Certainly, the mannequin contributed silently, but significantly, to an aspect of Millais' painting that was most regularly admired in the 1850s and 1860s: his exquisite rendering of fabrics, costume and dress.  One of the features of the The Black Brunswicker that elicited most critical acclaim, for example, was the 'full deep and plump' quality of the white satin dress that occupies well over a quarter of the picture surface and dramatically offsets the soldier's black uniform."

John Everett Millais
Sleeping
ca. 1865-66
oil on canvas
private collection

"A decade after the success of The Black Brunswicker, it was satin again, in the form of the couvre-pied at the foot of the child's bed in his enchanting painting of his youngest daughter, Sleeping, that struck contemporary critics as particularly brilliant and daring.  Indeed, with its companion, Waking, depicting another of his daughters, Mary, this affectionate genre-portrait has subsequently been compared to the tonal harmonies of Whistler's paintings of the period.  It seems highly probable that for both these paintings a child mannequin was as close a collaborator as his daughters."

John Everett Millais
Waking
ca. 1865-66
oil on canvas
Perth Museum and Art Gallery

John Everett Millais
The Crown of Love
1875
oil on canvas-
Pérez Simon Collection, Mexico

"In later years, however, after abandoning the Pre-Raphaelite principles of fidelity to nature and turning to more anecdotal subject painting, even the hugely gifted Millais proved fallible.  His painting The Crown of Love, based on a poem of the same title by George Meredith, was poorly received when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875, the stiffness of the female figure understandably being compared to an artist's dummy." 

John Ferguson Weir
His Favourite Model
ca. 1886
oil on canvas
Yale University Art Gallery

"John Ferguson Weir shows artist and mannequin hand in hand, in perfect collusion, mutually supportive in the most literal sense.  Although this is not a self-portrait, Weir is known to have acquired his father's mannequins in 1876 and to have used the artists' supplier Prang, who imported both French and Spanish mannequins into the United States.  . . .  Weir's part-portrait may be read as a candid acknowledgement of the artifice of picture-making.  Despite the physical rapprochement of artist and mannequin and the allusion to their collaborative partnership, Weir's remains a study of difference.  The dapperly dressed painter – whose identity is unknown – looks out of the canvas and engages directly with the viewer; by contrast, the mannequin's detachable papier mâché head is turned awkwardly on its frame so that it gazes vacantly, if benignly, into an undefined space." 

Edgar Degas
Portrait of Henri Michel-Lévy in his studio
ca. 1878
oil on canvas
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

"Like Weir's studio scene, Degas' is a frank and multi-layered avowal of pictorial artifice.  Contrary to their painted appearance, the 'naturalistic' outdoor scenes by Michel-Lévy that hang on the walls on either side of their author were not painted en plein air, Degas shows us, but were instead fanciful products of the imagination, executed in the studio, a 'revelation' entirely consistent with Degas' belief that landscape painters were deluded in their attempts to recreate nature by going to paint in front of it: 'the air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors'.  Similarly, the inelegantly slouched female figure leaning on the tree in the painting on the left is shown to have been modelled not from a real woman, but from the lay figure at Michel-Lévy's feet – one simulated life used in the creation of another.  Michel-Lévy's own pose seems to invite us to unravel the ruse: a witty play of bent elbows and casually crossed legs allies painter, mannequin and her painted replica, and draws attention to his own transformative power as creator."

– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Mannequins in the Studio - Part III

Hubert-François Gravelot
A Game of Quadrille
ca. 1740
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

"Gérard de Lairesse was among the most positive advocates for the use of mannequins, an enthusiasm that would later make him the butt of scathing satire by artists who had a different perception of both nature and artifice, and a mission to reform.  For him, using 'some artful implement' of this kind was a technical necessity, the equivalent of an astronomer using a globe or astrolabe, or an architect his 'plan and level'.  It was even akin to how 'the oval, triangle, square and compasses' served geometry; like these, the mannequin and its artificial associates were a means to a greater end: the study of nature and its laws.  That this form of painstaking scenographic work proved invaluable to artists is suggested by its persistence in the traditions of European art.  A few examples within the primarily Anglo-French axis of study will serve to illustrate this.  An obituary of the French Rococo painter Hubert-François Gravelot records that, while working in London [as directly above], he not only modelled his own figures in clay, but had made male and female mannequins of around fifteen inches in height, and so finely articulated they could be adjusted right down to the fingertips.  These were upholstered to assume external human forms, covered in knitted silk and equipped with their own miniature wardrobe.  Little wonder then that Gravelot's most renowned pupil, Thomas Gainsborough, in turn acquired two mannequins, one an 'ingeniously constructed' lay figure with brass joints which he so evidently used as a stand-in in his many portraits [as directly below], and which was sold after the death of his widow for £3, the other a life-sized figure stuffed with straw, which he appears to have been using at the end of the 1780s." 

Thomas Gainsborough
Heaneage Lloyd and his sister Lucy
ca. 1748-50
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Thomas Gainsborough
Conversation in a Park
ca. 1740
oil on canvas
Louvre, Paris

"To a great extent, Gainsborough's use of lay figures can be considered a figurative counterpart to his practice of creating model landscapes in his studio, substituting pieces of coal for rocks and broccoli for vegetation.  Inevitably, it led several contemporary critics to comment (not always unfavourably) on the otherworldly appearance of many of Gainsborough's sitters, an effect doubtless enhanced by the highly artificial character of his preparatory painting process.  One critic, the pseudonymous Roger Shanhagan, acknowledged that the artist succeeded in achieving a true likeness of his sitter, but at the same time recognized that 'we never mistake his paintings for real flesh and blood'; 'they have so little about them that looks like common Nature', he continued, 'that they are surely another race of beings'."

David Wilkie
Distraining for Rent
1815
oil on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

David Wilkie
Reading the Will
1820
oil on panel
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

 "One nineteenth-century painter who discovered the lay figure with relish in the early part of his career was the Scottish artist, Sir David Wilkie.  He acquired his first figures – one of either sex, around three feet high and with fluidly moving brass joints – in 1804, as a gift from the brother of the painter David Martin, and quickly found them to be valuable labour-saving devices, especially for painting clothes and draperies.  In addition to these, Wilkie adopted what he described  as 'the old system . . . of the Venetian and some of the Dutch painters' of making small clay models to help him record transitory effects of light and shade, a practice he believed enabled him to attain 'a force and consistency' in the final work that could be achieved by no other means.   . . .  For Reading the Will [directly above], Wilkie seems to have created nothing short of a miniature theatre, setting clay models of each of the figures in a wooden box, 'made with all the doors and windows of the apartment' and furnished with 'little tables, chairs, carpets & even pictures on the wall'.  The scene was lit by the natural fall of light from one of the windows, creating what Wilkie described as 'one of the most beautiful sights that the eye of an artist can behold', and one that also earned him the fulsome admiration of his fellow artists.  Like Poussin, he evolved the painting simultaneously in two and three dimensions, alternating with a series of compositional sketches in which he developed physiognomy, expression and gesture."

Paul Delaroche
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
1833
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Paul Delaroche
The Assassination of the duc de Guise
1834
oil on canvas
Musée Condé, Chantilly

"Artists across the spectrum were vulnerable to criticism for introducing the all-pervasive 'stench' of the mannequin (or the studio) in their work, and not even those with the most rigorous academic training, well-versed in anatomy and practised in drawing forms from the living model, were immune.  Paul Delaroche, one of the most successful French painters of his day, was a case in point.  His painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey [above], enthusiastically received at the Salon of 1834, was nevertheless criticized for making the figure of the executioner on the right of the painting too impassive: the consequence, it was claimed, of Delaroche's over-reliance on the inert mannequin.  Delaroche is certainly known to have made use of small wax figurines to prepare for his compositions, and for his almost contemporary painting, The Assassination of the duc de Guise [directly above], he commissioned both Jolivet, the chief technician of the Paris Opéra, and Dieterle, its decorator, to help him reconstruct the scene with a degree of historical accuracy.  However, as Stephen Bann has shown, Delaroche drew on a wide range of mediating sources to prepare his compositions, including paintings and prints of works by other artists, and he was careful to complement his use of the lay figure by working directly from living models, so for the most part avoiding accusations of mannequin-dependency."

Henri Lehmann
Grief of the Oceanides at the foot of the rock on which Prometheus is chained
1850
oil on canvas
Louvre, Paris

"Other academic painters concealed their 'bon ami' less effectively.  The fittingly-named German painter Henri Lehmann, a student of Ingres who settled in Paris in 1842 – and who self-evidently did not heed his master's advice to do away with the mannequin – was a case in point.  While he made a successful career as a painter of large-scale public decorations, and eventually became Professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1875, he regularly came under attack on account of the anatomical inaccuracy of his figure painting, as well as his inability to vary the figure types he used.  This one-figure-fits-all approach was considered one of the major defects of his painting The Grief of the Oceanides [directly above], a subject drawn from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, that was commissioned by the State in 1849 for the sum of 6,000 francs.  As the critic of L'Artiste wrote, Lehmann's particular failing was his tendency always to paint the same tiresomely 'look-alike' figures, and always in the same colour palette, one that an English critic had described five years earlier, with reference to a portrait Lehmann exhibited in London, as 'ugly and grey'.  The pallor of the sitter's complexion did not 'look like health, nor malady, nor even death', the latter complained, but had 'a petrified and mummified air like the children one would see in the cabinet of M. Geoffroy de St Hilaire', a reference to the deformed foetuses studied by the eminent naturalist in his research into tetratology.  Although perhaps less unappealingly cadaverous, the Oceanides nevertheless struck critics as too blandly monochrome and too stiffly formulaic, an effect which they attributed to an overuse of the mannequin."

Gustave Moreau
Salomé Dancing before Herod
1876
oil on canvas
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Gustave Moreau
Salomé
ca. 1874
wax sculpture over wooden armature
Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris

"As notions of 'finish' in both painting and sculpture were challenged in the late nineteenth century, so the boundaries between three-dimensional preparatory model and sculpture in its strictest, or at least traditional, sense became blurred.  A case in point is the series of small-scale wax sculptures created by the painter Gustave Moreau from the beginning of the 1860s and throughout the following decade.  . . .  Among the most intriguing and enigmatic of the group of fifteen such models to have survived is the figurine representing Salomé [directly above], her hands raised as she recoils before the apparition of the head of John the Baptist.  Its date of execution is uncertain, but it was presumably made during the two-year period from 1874 to 1876 when Moreau worked on the final version of the painting [above], and developed in parallel with a large number of related oil sketches, watercolours and drawings . . .  Whereas Moreau's other sculptures are either made solely in wax or modelled over a type of metal armature commonly available in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, recent technical analysis has shown that the figure of Salomé was made using an off-the-shelf articulated wooden mannequin (or 'maquette' as they were called in contemporary trade catalogues) which he then covered with various thicknesses of wax, and swathed – almost mummified – in a thin beige fabric."

Ford Madox Brown
Chaucer at the Court of Edward III
1847-51
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

"As the Swiss painter, Pierre-Louis Bouvier reminded young artists in 1827, arranging drapery was not only difficult, but demanded knowledge, taste and patience: it was entirely possible to spend an entire day on this task without achieving a satisfactory result, he warned.  Decades later, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown would doubtless have concurred: in October 1847, for example, he recorded in his diary that, having risen at quarter-past-seven in the morning, he did nothing else all day but arrange the cloak of the female figure in the foreground of his painting Chaucer at the Court of Edward III [directly above].  Happily, manuals and treatises on painting offered plentiful advice on how to hone this specialized skill.  Virtually all agreed that the lay figure was an indispensable accomplice, but in every case advised that it should be used with caution, so as not to allow the rigidity of the mannequin to pervade the 'natural' fall of the fabric."

Ford Madox Brown
Pretty Baa-Lambs
ca. 1851-59
oil on panel
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

" . . . Brown obtained mannequins from a variety of sources, borrowing one from his friend Charles Lucy, hiring others from the colourmen Charles Barbe and Robert (R. & C.R.) Briggs, and in yet another case making his own, of a child: a willingness to improvise that might well have been a consequence of his severely straitened financial circumstances at the time.  Later in 1848, during a trip to Paris, Brown finally invested in his own mannequin . . .  It may be that this was the figure, dressed in eighteenth-century clothes, that he posed each day for a period of five months in 1851 in the garden of his house in Stockwell when preparing his painting Pretty Baa-Lambs [directly above], taking care to bring it in every evening and when it began to rain.  Baa-Lambs was Brown's first work in which both figures and landscape were painted entirely out of doors, and he famously paid scrupulous attention to recreating every detail of the scene, using his wife and child as models for the central figures, importing sheep from Clapham Common and applying a thick ground of Roberson's copal (flake white) paint over a smooth mahogany panel surface to recreate the intense luminosity of full sunlight.  However, his laborious efforts were somewhat undermined by the almost hieratical stiffness of the principal figure, considered by one critic to be unnaturally elongated, and by another, William Roberts, to have 'an upright and screw-jointed air'." 

Ford Madox Brown
The Last of England
1860
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

"But appearances could and did deceive.  In exactly the same way he had done in Baa-Lambs, Brown for his painting The Last of England [directly above] alternated between living and familiar models (himself and Emma for the two principal figures) and mannequins, to study the coat of the emigrant and, less successfully, the shawl of his wife.  Yet on this occasion the painting was praised by critics for its conspicuous absence of lay figures, most especially among the colourful cast of characters in the background of the painting: none, it was claimed, was 'a mere stock-personage, a lay figure . . . each comes living from the painter's mind'."

Frederick Richard Pickersgill
The Burial of Harold at Waltham Abbey
1847
oil on canvas
Palace of Westminster Collection, London

"In keeping with the fascination for subjects from national history in nineteenth-century England, one of the 'death subjects' that held greatest appeal for contemporary artists was the slaying of the Saxon King Harold by William the Conqueror on the field of the Battle of Hastings.  In 1847 both Ford Madox Brown and Frederick Richard Pickersgill submitted cartoons on the subject for the competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, and a decade or so later its popularity had become such that painting the dying Harold was reported to have become something of a rite of passage for the aspiring painter: every art student in the country had dressed up a lay figure to represent the expiring King, Punch claimed, issuing a plea for him to be allowed at last 'to rest in his grave, his body safe from future discovery'."

– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Mannequins in the Studio - Part II

Anonymous Florentine artist
Drapery study, kneeling figure
ca. 1520-40
drawing
British Museum

Pellegrino Tibaldi
Drapery study for Christ at the Last Judgment
ca. 1550-55
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Federico Barocci
Drapery study for St Catherine of Alexandria
ca. 1560
drawing
British Museum

Bernardino Campi
Drapery study from the back
ca. 1570
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"The Cremonese painter, Bernardino Campi, who gives one of the most detailed accounts of  how such 'modelli' were made and configured, recommended in 1584 that the figurines should be attached to the notional 'floor' by 'touching a hot iron stylus', implying that they were made from wax, a medium that he and many other artists preferred for its malleability and ease of reworking – unlike clay, its shape could be altered after soaking in hot water.  In his treatise on painting of 1587, Campi's friend Giovanni Battista Armenini (1530-1609) similarly highlighted the advantages of wax as a modelling material: not only could its consistency be altered by adding fat, turpentine and linseed oil, but a range of different pigments such as red ochre, soot and lead white could be added to vary the colour.  Once firmly affixed to the supporting board, these miniature mise-en-scènes could be viewed at different levels and angles to ensure that effects of foreshortening, light and shadow (and therefore colour) could be effectively recreated in compositional drawings and, eventually, the finished work.  Others, notably Jacopo Tintoretto and Nicolas Poussin, developed variants on Campi's construction in the form of a box, with apertures cut in its side to represent the architectural interiors – palace, church or grand salone – in which the protagonists of their istoria were placed."

Annibale Carracci
Drapery study from the side
before 1605
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Annibale Carracci
Drapery study for kneeling prophet
before 1605
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Annibale Carracci
Drapery study
before 1605
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Annibale Carracci
Drapery study for the Virgin
before 1605
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Nicolas Poussin
Sacrament of Extreme Unction
ca. 1638-40
oil on canvas
(commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo)
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

"While Poussin's biographers confirm his use of wax figures as a means of developing preliminary compositional drawings, their accounts give varying, sometimes conflicting, details about the devices which Poussin used to construct a three-dimensional setting.  Bellori described the small wax models as being about 'half a palm' (that is, about 11 centimeters) high, which Poussin would dispose in positions that replicated those in his intended pictorial narrative.  He would then make large figures, covering them with small pieces of fine canvas or cambric, to help him map out areas of light and shade and to achieve a balance of colors.  Complemented by studies made from the living model, this procedure allowed him to develop a composition through a series of preliminary drawings [as below] which, if summary in execution, contained all the elements of movement and expression that would appear in the final painting [as above].  An account by the German painter, Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), who knew Poussin between 1628 and 1635, suggests that the latter adapted the, by then, well-established practice of 'dressing' his wax figurines in damp paper or fine taffeta, which he would position on 'a board laid out with flagstones', using taut strings to mark the perspective so that the figures could be set in convincing relationships to one another.  Only the painter Antoine Leblond de Latour, writing four years after Poussin's death in 1665, mentions Poussin's 'invention' of a 'grande machine', that consisted of a 'planche barlongue' (that is, a board or piece of wood, longer on one side than the other, possibly trapezoid in shape), on top of which he arranged suitably clothed figurines, and covered with a box made of an unknown material and closed on all five sides.  Holes were then cut on the side of the box to illuminate the scene from the outside, and another, smaller hole cut in the front to allow Poussin to observe 'the whole tableau from a distance', and from this to make a compositional drawing to be worked up in the painting."

Nicolas Poussin
Study for Holy Family in the Temple
ca. 1641-43
 drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Nicolas Poussin
Study for Holy Family on the Steps
ca. 1648
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Carlo Maratti
Drapery study of genuflecting figure
ca. 1685
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Giambattista Tiepolo
Drapery study for St Pascal Baylon
ca. 1767-69
drawing on blue paper
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Giambattista Tiepolo
Drapery study with cloak
before 1770
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge