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| Meredith Frampton Portrait of Marguerite Kelsey 1928 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Alan Beeton Marguerite Kelsey 1936 oil on canvas private collection |
"Marguerite Kelsey was one of the models most in demand amongst Academy painters such as Alan Beeton and Meredith Frampton during the 1920s and 1930s. She was valued for her slenderness and elegance and for her ability to hold a pose for an unusually long period. She could pose for as long as four hours at a stretch. Her former training in dancing helped her perform such feats. She had a strong sense of her worth and valued her independence. She preferred to work for older male artists and appears to have enjoyed respectful friendships with them. She had a particular liking for Beeton. "Alan Beeton was my god. I was the only model he ever used –he painted me for ten years, and educated me at the same time. He taught me how to read and write, took me through the classics, showed me how to use a knife and fork in restaurants. I owe him everything."
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| Derek Hill Boxer Resting - Don Cockell 1949 oil on canvas Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, West Midlands |
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| Frederic, Lord Leighton Study of Dorothy Dene 1884 drawing private collection |
"Dorothy Dene (1859-1899) was Frederic Leighton's most celebrated model. However, it was her friendship, quite as much as her use to him as a model, that he valued. Dorothy, whose real name was Ada Alice Pullen, began modelling to Leighton in 1879. . . . Curiously, he found it difficult to capture a good likeness of her, even though her "very beautiful throat was reproduced worthily in many of his subject-pictures." Soon Leighton was also employing Dorothy's younger sisters as models, spending time with the whole family. "I go to see them, when I want to let my back hair down and get off the stilts." Leighton encouraged Dorothy in her ambitions to train as an actress. Unfortunately, as Leighton's friend Mrs Barrington recalled, Dorothy's "very beautiful face and throat were not seen to advantage, as they were hardly in proportion to her figure, which was short and too stiffly set to move gracefully on the stage."
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| William Holman Hunt Study of a Head (Edith Holman Hunt) 1884 oil on panel Manchester Art Gallery |
"Edith Holman Hunt (née Waugh, 1846-1931) was the younger sister of Hunt's first wife, Fanny, who died in 1866. According to her granddaughter, Edith fell in love with Hunt at the age of fifteen, although they did not marry until she was twenty-nine, and he was nearly fifty. The couple married in 1875 in Neufchâtel, Switzerland, their union being illegal in England according to the Deceased Wife's Sister Act. Edith, self-consciously middle-class and respectable, was quite the opposite of Hunt's erstwhile working-class model and mistress Annie Miller. Etiquette demanded that while Edith, like the other Waugh sisters, could sit for their portraits, acting as a model – even for facial features – was not comme il faut."
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| Henry Scott Tuke Our Jack 1886 oil on canvas Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, Falmouth |
"In 1885 Henry Scott Tuke returned to Falmouth, where he had spent his boyhood. With him he brought a young Cockney model named Walter Shilling, who had also modelled regularly at the Slade. Tiring of Shilling's company . . . Tuke befriended various local boys, including the sixteen-year-old Jack Rowling. Our Jack is Tuke's first painting of Rowling. Although Tuke used a number of boys as models, Jack Rowling was clearly his favourite, thirteen of the twenty paintings Tuke listed in 1887 being modelled on him. In the majority of these works Rowling posed fully clothed; only once stripped to the waist; never naked."
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| James McNeill Whistler Little Juniper Bud (Lizzie Willis) ca. 1896-97 oil on canvas Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow |
"During the 1890s, at a time when he was running his own atelier, Whistler returned to making direct studies from the model. He made something of a specialty of portraits of young girls, apparently with the encouragement of his wife. . . . Lizzie Willis was the eight-year-old daughter of Whistler's housekeeper, and was used by the artist as an occasional model when other young girls were not available. Mrs Willis, who took up her post in 1896, was dismissed by the artist for drunkenness in July 1897. It seems that the whole Willis family, including Lizzie, were addicted to gin. It was this habit that Whistler referred to in the title to this study."
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| Gerald Kelly Jane XXX (Lilian Ryan) 1930 oil on canvas Royal Academy of Arts, London |
"Trained in Paris, after taking a degree at Cambridge, Gerald Kelly eventually became one of the most fashionable portraitists in Britain. . . . In 1920 he married Lilian Ryan, a young model from a working-class family whom he had met in 1916, when she was posing under the guidance of George Clausen. Kelly painted many portraits of her, exhibiting them under the nickname that he had given her, 'Jane,' with the addition of a Roman numeral which corresponded with the year of the exhibition. . . . The Jane portraits were legendary during the period, and when Queen Mary was introduced to the sitter for them she exclaimed, "Jane, of the many Janes!"
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| Gwen John Nude Girl (Fenella Lovell) ca. 1909-1910 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Roger Fry Nude on a Sofa (Nina Hamnett) 1917 oil on canvas private collection |
"Roger Fry met Nina Hamnett in autumn 1913, when he employed her at the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Street. In the summer of 1916 they began an affair, Fry owning that he was, at fifty, "a great deal too old . . . for such a volage." The present picture, in which Nina's naked form is set against the bright colours of an Omega rug, reveals the casual intimacy of the relationship, and Fry's admiration for her "queer satyr-like oddity and grace."
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| Stanley Spencer Patricia Preece Nude 1935 oil on canvas Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull |
"Patricia Preece was an artist who had trained at the Slade and in Paris under André Lhote. She lived with her friend Dorothy Hepworth on the edge of Cookham Moor, close to Stanley Spencer's native village, where he retained a residence. Spencer met her in 1929. He was attracted by her positive personality, and eventually married her on 29 May 1937 after having divorced his first wife, Hilda, on 25 May. . . . Spencer did not like using a professional model and was delighted when Preece offered to pose nude for him. He was keen to study the naked figure as an individual rather than as an anonymous nude."
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| Marguerite Evans Portrait of Quentin Crisp ca. 1943 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
"Quentin Crisp began working as a model in art schools during the late 1930s. Himself a writer and artist, Crisp was an excellent model, sympathetic and encouraging to the students and capable of adopting striking poses and holding them perfectly. Marguerite Evans painted this portrait of him when studying part-time in Willesden Technical College in the class of Maurice de Sausmarez. She recalls, "In portrait classes Quentin was a perfect model, inspiring in his posture, retained remarkably in accurate position over six sittings of 2½ hour sessions. One never had to redraw or repaint one's canvas painting stages, as uncannily he resumed the identical position after each rest period."
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| Ivor Williams Study of a Soldier ca. 1940-45 oil on canvas (grisaille) Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum & Galleries |
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| Anonymous German Photographer Willi Olympier posed as a sculpture, The Marathon Runner 1906 photographic postcard Wellcome Collection, London |
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| Anonymous French Photographer Bobby Pandur, Le Roi de la Beauté Plastique ca. 1910 photographic postcard Wellcome Collection, London |
"Bobby Pandur poses wearing a jockstrap sitting on a rug in the pose of the Dying Gladiator (but with his left hand on his heart instead of on his knee). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of 'masculine beauty' seems to have been more readily acceptable in France than elsewhere. Elsewhere, strongmen such as Eugen Sandow could ostensibly be feted for their strength and power, where in France bodybuilders such as Bobby Pandur could be celebrated as paragons of masculine beauty." – from curator's notes at the Wellcome Collection
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| Christopher Wood Constant Lambert 1927 oil on canvas Towner Gallery, Eastbourne |
– quoted passages from The Artist's Model from Etty to Spencer by Martin Postle and William Vaughan (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999)