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| John Everett Millais Model posed as Archer 1847 drawing Towneley Hall Art Gallery, Burnley, Lancashire |
"This drawing was probably made at the Royal Academy of Arts, where Millais drew the living model from 1843. The model, set in the attitude of an archer, would have been posed by one of the Academicians in the role of Visitor. At the time, Visitors included William Mulready, whose highly naturalistic approach to the nude model is echoed in the present drawing. Because he was still a teenager Millais was allowed to work only from the male model, the female model being available only to students who were aged twenty and above or were married."
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| John Everett Millais Standing Model 1847 drawing private collection |
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| John Everett Millais Study of Antique Statuary in the British Museum 1843 drawing Royal Academy of Arts, London |
"These drawings were made by Millais at the British Museum at the age of fourteen. The head of a satyr on the left was part of the Townley collection, while the draped torso belonged to the Elgin collection. Millais' career allegedly began at the age of four, under the tutelage of a drawing master in Jersey who gave him engravings after Old Master paintings to copy. In July 1840 he became a Probationer at the Royal Academy Schools. By December, having completed the obligatory and supervised anatomical and antique drawings, Millais was admitted as a student. Now aged eleven, he was the youngest full student [admitted since the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768]."
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| William Bell Scott Academic Figure Study 1837 drawing Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| William Strutt Academic Figure Study ca. 1850 drawing British Museum |
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| William Edward Frost Standing Model ca. 1840 oil on canvas, mounted on panel Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| William Edward Frost Seated Model ca. 1840 drawing, with watercolor Courtauld Gallery, London |
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| Ford Madox Brown Half-Length Figure Study ca. 1846-49 drawing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
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| Ford Madox Brown Three-Quarter Length Figure Study ca. 1847 drawing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
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| Ford Madox Brown Full-Length Figure Study ca. 1847 drawing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
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| Thomas Faed Life Study of John Mongo, or, The Punka-walla 1847 oil on paper, mounted on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
"Thomas Faed was admitted to the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh in 1843. He was a prize-winning student both in the Antique School and in the life class. Despite the evidence of Faed's accomplished life painting, the Trustees Academy was facing a crisis by the mid-1840s. It was effectively split into two schools, one catering in theory for design students, the other for fine art students – although, in truth, few were genuinely interested in the design option. Teaching standards were privately perceived to be slipping, and the Trustees Academy was engaged in a bitter dispute with the Scottish Royal Academy, who claimed that life classes had been introduced by the Trustees with the specific intention of sabotaging its own attempt to start up an art school; which was especially galling as the Trustees Academy had been founded to assist manufactures, not high art, and did not therefore need to run life classes. The issue temporarily subsided, although life classes eventually slipped from the grasp of the Trustees Academy. The situation was a microcosm of a wider debate in nineteenth-century Britain over the nature of art education versus design education and the relative rights of artists and artisans – a debate in which the artist's model was an unwitting pawn."
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| Alfred Stevens Standing Model 1844 drawing Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Anonymous British Artist Standing Male Model ca. 1850 oil on paper Royal Academy of Arts, London |
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| Anonymous British Artist Standing Male Model ca. 1850 oil on paper Royal Academy of Arts, London |
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| Anonymous British Artist Standing Female Model ca. 1850 oil on paper Royal Academy of Arts, London |
The three studies directly above belong to a group of nineteen similar works preserved at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. These have in the past been published and exhibited as by one of the greatest and most prolific British figure painters, William Etty (1787-1849). "However," as curators at the Royal Academy now write, "it has been found that one of the sheets is watermarked 1850, a year after the artist's death, and although the studies resemble Etty's work in terms of the colouring, poses and general effect, they also differ from it in certain details. In particular, these studies are on paper whereas Etty preferred to use millboard. Also, the draughtsmanship displays a greater interest in anatomical correctness than would usually be evident in Etty's work."
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| Joseph Maclise Surgical Anatomy, plate 6 1851 lithograph Wellcome Collection, London |
"This lithograph from Joseph Maclise's Surgical Anatomy is a graphic illustration of the manner in which mid-Victorian techniques of life drawing permeated medical treatises, and a reminder of the way in which the poor served as models in death as well as life. . . . Maclise artfully presents a highly naturalistic study of the living model as a cadaver which – despite the graphic dissection of its upper arm – appears very much alive, and quite as unconcerned as if its pulse were being taken. These consciously tasteful anatomical illustrations are quite opposed to the contorted corpses depicted by an earlier generation, notably Charles Bell and Benjamin Robert Haydon. . . . In his introduction to Surgical Anatomy, Maclise explained the reasons for minimizing the morbid nature of his plates: 'We dissect the dead animal body in order to furnish the memory with as clear an account of the structure contained in its living representatives, which we are not allowed to analyze, as if this latter were perfectly translucent, and directly demonstrative of its component parts.' Formerly, the "'dead animal bodies" upon which anatomists and surgeons performed dissections were those of executed criminals. Following the Anatomy Act of 1832, the use of paupers was allowed. Indeed, as Ruth Richardson has written, 'What had for generations been a feared and hated punishment for murder became one for poverty."
– quoted passages from The Artist's Model from Etty to Spencer by Martin Postle and William Vaughan (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999)