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| Alphonse Legros Study of a cast of the Belvedere Torso ca. 1880-90 drawing British Museum |
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| Alphonse Legros Study of a cast of the Belvedere Torso ca. 1880-90 drawing British Museum |
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| Alphonse Legros Study of a cast of the Belvedere Torso ca. 1880-90 drawing British Museum |
"Alphonse Legros, a fine etcher who taught at the Slade School from 1876 to 1892, instructed his students to study their models "with such a thoroughness as to get them by heart." He believed in drawing "with the point," which was used in fluent, firm strokes to indicate the outline and the major "junctions" of the body. Shading, as here, was indicated not with the stump, but by a series of closely hatched lines. While his technique was perceived as radical, he maintained a reverence for tradition and the Old Masters. At the Slade he mounted large photographs of the drawings of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo for copying. He also expected all students to begin by working from the Antique, initially from fragments, then from complete figures."
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| Alphonse Legros Study of a Greek before 1892 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Alphonse Legros Recumbent Model ca. 1885 drawing (study for Dead Christ) British Museum |
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| Alphonse Legros Standing Model before 1892 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Kate Ethel Cowderoy Standing Model ca. 1895 oil on canvas Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire |
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| Kate Ethel Cowderoy Recumbent Model ca. 1895 oil on canvas Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire |
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| Kate Ethel Cowderoy Standing Model ca. 1895 oil on canvas Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire |
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| John Everett Millais A Disciple 1895 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
"The model for A Disciple was Mary Lloyd, who began to work professionally for artists following an introduction to Millais. Her classical good looks and tall, graceful physique ensured her popularity among the most successful and fashionable artists of the 1890s. She sat to Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Frank Dicksee, Holman Hunt, William Blake Richmond, Thomas Brock, Lord Leighton, and the young figurative painter Herbert Draper, who sketched her extensively. According to Draper, Mary refused to pose naked as a "figure model," thus retaining her respectability. . . . Her personal history would probably have remained a mystery had not a reporter from The Sunday Express come across her during the 1930s, then aged seventy. She was apparently the daughter of a Shropshire squire, forced to seek employment in London following her father's bankruptcy. Although she prospered initially, her fortunes were clearly tied to the artists to whom she modelled. "One by one the artists died. Each year I grew poorer and poorer, and moved, as I did so, to humbler apartments." A serious illness around 1913 left Mary without money or friends. By 1933 she was living in a garret in Kensington eking out a living as a cleaner and seamstress."
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| John Everett Millais A Forerunner 1896 oil on canvas Glasgow Museums |
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| John Everett Millais The Knight Errant 1870 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
"It is striking that the Pre-Raphaelites – the brotherhood that sought to reform the academic tradition by simultaneously emulating the 'honesty' of medieval art and portraying the contemporary world realistically – should have steered clear of the nude. While they studied unclothed figures – in the academic tradition – as a preparatory phase, they did not display nakedness in their finished works. Even Rossetti's 'stunners' – eroticized portraits of contemporary beauties thinly disguised as historical and mythological characters – are clothed. Rossetti finally risked an exposed breast in Venus Verticordia of 1864-65, but it was not until 1870, with Millais's Knight Errant, that a full frontal nude went on display, precipitating much controversy."
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| John Singer Sargent Study of a Model in the Studio 1895 lithograph British Museum |
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| John Singer Sargent Reclining Model ca. 1890 drawing Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University |
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| John Singer Sargent Reclining Model ca. 1890 drawing Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University |
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| John Singer Sargent Reclining Model ca. 1892 watercolor National Museum of Wales, Cardiff |
"The present study [directly above] has been regarded as a "pleasant contrast, in its unstudied naturalism, to those more consciously posed figures" by the artist. However, despite the seemingly relaxed pose, this is not an impromptu studio pose but a deliberate imitation of the celebrated antique statue known as the Barberini Faun. . . . During the early 1890s Sargent began to work intensively from the male nude in his studio at Fairford, many of these studies being related to the murals he painted for Boston Public Library. Among the models who sat to him at that time were several Italians, notably Nicola d'Inverno, who for the next twenty years served Sargent as model and manservant. The model used in the present study was, it has been suggested, Luigi Mancini, whose family were prominent among the Italian modelling community. Certainly, he is identifiable as the thick-set moustached model who features in a number of dynamic charcoal studies by Sargent now in the Fogg Art Museum."
– quoted passages from The Artist's Model from Etty to Spencer by Martin Postle and William Vaughan (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999)