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| Edwin Long The Chosen Five (Zeuxis at Crotona) 1885 oil on canvas Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth |
"The Chosen Five illustrates one of the most enduring and celebrated artist-model narratives. Long depicts the dénouement of the story, originally told by Cicero and the elder Pliny, of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, who, in an attempt to portray the perfect beauty of Helen of Troy, invited the most beautiful women in the city of Croton to model for him. From these he selected five, taking from each her best physical features to make a composite ideal. . . . Although the theme of the painting quite deliberately exploits the erotic potential of the subject matter, Long was praised for his tasteful and restrained handling of a 'difficult' subject. The World noted that, "the academic atmosphere throws, as it were, a veil over those undisguised humanities which should, I think, tend to keep them pure in the mind of Mrs. Boyn from the category of 'hussies'." As Alison Smith has observed, in the context of attitudes toward the female nude model in 1880s England, "Classical myths played a strategic role in dissociating the model from any insinuation of immorality; at the same time they reinforced the idea that the female body provided a perennial source of inspiration for artist and connoisseur alike." In other words, pictures like these were ideal vehicles for legitimizing male fantasy, at the very moment when the female nude as a motif was under attack by moral reformers and the female model was being characterized as a social and moral pariah."
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| Ralph Hedley John Graham Lough in his Studio 1881 oil on canvas Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne |
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| Dudley Hardy Idle Moments 1889 oil on board private collection |
"The prime purpose of the model's presence in the studio was to assist the artist in realising a figure in a specific work of art. By the late nineteenth century, the public appetite for vignettes from studio life led artists to record extraneous events surrounding the central ritual – models arriving at the studio door, models eating their dinner, models playing with paint brushes or models admiring themselves in the studio mirror. Collectively these images constructed an image of the model as a pet or plaything, Harry Furniss remarking how one fellow graphic artist, although he did not use a model, liked to have one "knocking around" the studio while he worked – with his back towards her. . . . Contrary to the fantasy of models as studio pets providing inspiration or creature comfort, artists privately acknowledged that prostitution remained an alternative or a supplement to female models' wages, Landseer stating, upon recommending a model to Mulready, that "perhaps an honest penny may be put in her way." A handful of women, like Steer's model, Rose Pettigrew, or Connie Gilchrist, who went on to marry into money and title, profited materially and socially from their liaisons with artists. But while some enjoyed, and courted, their reflected glory, the majority preferred anonymity."
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| John Singer Sargent Model standing before a Stove ca. 1875-80 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Francis Cadell The Model ca. 1909-1915 oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
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| William Orpen The Studio ca. 1910 oil on canvas Leeds City Art Gallery, West Yorkshire |
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| Howard Somerville Self Portrait with Model ca. 1912 oil on canvas Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire |
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| Laura Knight Self Portrait with Model 1913 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
"In one sense the position of women in the studio presented a paradox. In the public imagination female models – particularly nude models – were an indelible fixture of studio life. Less well known was the fact that, as artists, women had been compelled for generations to work from the model in the privacy of the studio – since their presence was barely tolerated in the public sphere of the art school. Laura Knight, although she was the same age as Orpen, did not enjoy the same freedom as he had. Denied the opportunity to work from the life, she bravely invited one of the models, a half-blind young man named Jack Price who worked at her art school in Nottingham, to pose nude for her in the studio: "I, almost afraid to look at him, when the first hourly rest became due, took his outstretched hand in my own to help him down from the model throne. As it turned out, he was not asking for help, but for a piece of chalk to mark the exact position of his feet. I blushed at the thought that he might think I was making advances . . . it was a terrible ordeal altogether." Subsequently Knight found peace and relaxation, away from the metropolis, in a hut in Cornwall. There she painted her model, Ella Naper, including Self Portrait with Model."
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| Richard Polak The Artist and his Model 1914 platinum print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"Richard Polak was born in Rotterdam and studied photography with Karl Schenker in Berlin before coming to London around 1910. He began exhibiting photographs in 1913 and became a member of the London Salon of Photography in 1915. In the same year he moved to Switzerland and seems to have given up photography soon afterwards. During his short career as a photographer he concentrated on tableaux that imitated seventeenth-century Dutch paintings."
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| John Lavery Daylight Raid from my Studio Window 7 July 1917 1917 oil on canvas Ulster Museum, Belfast |
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| Christopher Nevinson A Studio in Montparnasse 1926 oil on canvas Tate Gallery, London |
"The picture was painted when Nevinson was living in Paris, where he had studied before World War One. It shows the studio of the author and journalist Sisley Huddleston. As Nevinson recounts in his memoirs, Huddleston wrote to the press at the time the work was acquired by the Tate to protest that "there was a nude in the studio, and the studio was his." Nevinson claimed that he had not intended to produce anything sensational: "When I worked on the picture and put in the nude, I was thinking only of the design. But then I always forget the interpretation the average member of the public puts on a nude. Nothing startles me more than when the mayor and his aldermen representing various municipal galleries come to my studio to choose a picture, and they arrive all agog and begin lifting the curtains and peering into cubby-holes in the hope of seeing a naked lady."
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| Alan Beeton Posing 1929 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Leonard John Fuller Studio Haphazard ca. 1943 oil on canvas Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Wales |
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| John Richardson Gauld Resting Model ca. 1942 oil on canvas Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne |
It was Anne Hollander in her 1978 book Seeing Through Clothes who revealed the obvious but previously unarticulated fact that painted female nudes, especially in the 20th century, remained effectively clothed in the supporting garments that regulated their bodies. The model above epitomizes the Forties Pin-Up precisely because her figure is moulded to the ideal-of-the-moment by an invisible girdle and an invisible push-up bra – she even wears invisible high heels.
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| John Minton Painter and Model 1953 oil on canvas Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth |
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| P.J. Crook Artist and Model 1995 acrylic on board Rye Art Gallery, Sussex |
– quoted passages from The Artist's Model from Etty to Spencer by Martin Postle and William Vaughan (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999)