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| 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."
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| Thomas Gainsborough Heaneage Lloyd and his sister Lucy ca. 1748-50 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| 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'."
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| David Wilkie Distraining for Rent 1815 oil on panel National Galleries of Scotland |
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| 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."
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| Paul Delaroche The Execution of Lady Jane Grey 1833 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| 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."
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| 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."
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| Gustave Moreau Salomé Dancing before Herod 1876 oil on canvas Hammer Museum, Los Angeles |
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| 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."
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| 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."
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| 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'."
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| 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'."
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| 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