Most figurative art, both painting and sculpture, is the product of a partnership between the artist and their model. This weekend I celebrate the contributions made by the latter, always seen but never credited. The partnership often extends beyond art into their personal lives, but is seldom acknowledged by either party. Ironically, we come to know the faces and bodies of those models far better than those of the artist, so at least the long-suffering model achieves some kind of immortality.

In many circumstances, models are called on to hold certain postures for uncomfortably long times.

Kirsty Whiten‘s models have had to be lithe, nimble, and patient to give her the time to capture such dynamic poses.

But they are momentary in comparison with marathons spread over several months, as required by Ellen Altfest‘s highly detailed realism. In order to achieve this, she enforces a five minute break every thirty minutes of posing, but even then models may have to drop out because of the number of days required posing for each of her paintings.

Some artists have pondered their relationship with their models visually,

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Artist’s Model (1895) is one of a series of works considering the artist – here, Gérôme in the role of a sculptor – the model, and the art work. Behind his model Emma Dupont is a completed polychrome statue of her putting her head through a hoop.

Like so many others, Emma Dupont arrived in Paris with her lover at the age of seventeen, only to be abandoned by him. Penniless, she was introduced to modelling by Alfred Stevens, and it was Fernand Cormon who first persuaded her to pose nude. She worked for several other artists before catching Gérôme’s eye, and quickly became his favourite. Over a period of about twenty years, she was frequently to be found naked in Gérôme’s studio, from which she made a comfortable living. No one knows if she had any closer relationship with him, or with any other artist.

One of the most famous of all artists’ models was a young Irish woman, Joanna Hiffernan, who appears in some of Whistler’s and Courbet’s paintings, and was a lover to both. Hiffernan seems to have been born in about 1843, and first met Whistler in 1860. She travelled with him to France in 1861, and posed there in a studio in Boulevard des Batignolles for one of his greatest paintings.

Whistler’s remarkable Symphony in White no 1: The White Girl (1862) shows her great beauty. But there was more to her than her looks: those who knew her remarked on her intelligence, the sympathy that she gave people, and the companionship that she provided the artist.

Attitudes towards artists’ models at the time weren’t even ambivalent: they were seen as little more than common prostitutes. When Whistler’s mother visited in 1864, Hiffernan had to be secreted away from her sight. At some time around 1865-66, she met Gustave Courbet, and when Whistler went off to Valparaiso for seven months in 1866, she returned to Paris and posed for Courbet.

Courbet’s initial modest portrait of Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1866) was a harbinger of more to come.

Next she is the erotically-charged nude in Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot (1866), then in a lesbian embrace in The Sleepers (1866), and possibly even the explicit headless nude of The Origin of the World (1866). After they had separated, Hiffernan raised Whistler’s illegitimate son by another lover, and re-appeared to pay her last respects at Whistler’s funeral in 1903.

Less known but as well-featured is Lise Tréhot, born in 1848, who moved as a child to Paris, as the daughter of a shopkeeper selling lemonade and tobacco. An older sister became the lover of a now-forgotten artist Jules Le Coeur, who in turn introduced Lise to the young painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1865, when he was twenty-four, and she was only seventeen.

Renoir started painting Lise the following year, when she had just turned eighteen. Within another year, she posed nude for Renoir’s Diana as Huntress (1867), which was rejected by that year’s Salon. Over the next five years, she modelled for at least twenty paintings, and was in effect his only model for female figures during this formative period in his career. She also appears in two of Frédéric Bazille’s paintings.

One of Renoir’s best portraits of Tréhot is In the Summer (The Bohemian), painted in 1868 when she would have been twenty.

Later, Renoir posed her in an imaginary Algerian harem in his Odalisque (1870), another of those popular faux-Orientalist paintings.

Probably the last of Renoir’s works to feature Tréhot is his Parisiennes in Algerian Costume, or Harem from 1872, where she appears as the woman at the right.

Renoir never mentioned her in any recorded source, but she’s thought to have given birth to their son at the end of 1868, and is recorded as having their daughter in the summer of 1870. Renoir supported her financially throughout the rest of his life, and Ambroise Vollard his dealer continued to do so after his death.

Renoir and Tréhot seem to have separated suddenly in 1872, and it’s thought they never met or spoke again after that. She married in 1883, raised her own family with her architect husband, and died in Paris in 1922.

Reference

Susan Waller’s superb article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.

Aprons are protective garments normally worn over the front of the body and upper legs, where they’re intended to prevent other clothes from soiling, and sometimes the wearer underneath. Although frequently seen in paintings, their absence must be interpreted with caution: most figurative paintings are made in the studio, where the only folk likely to be wearing aprons are the artist and their assistants. The wear of aprons is also markedly gendered; although in real life many men wear them at work, those most likely to be depicted with them are overwhelmingly women.

Aprons have been strongly associated with those in domestic service, and appear in folk tales such as Cinderella.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one glass slipper on her left foot. She is seen in a scullery with a dull, patched and grubby working dress and apron.

Intimate Conversation from about 1892 shows a young couple talking idly outdoors in the sun. Évariste Carpentier puts a prominent tear in the young woman’s apron to emphasise their poverty.

Probably the most famous painted apron is that worn by Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid in about 1658-59.

This woman, seen in three-quarter view, wears working dress: a stiff, white linen cap, a yellow jacket laced at the front, a brilliant ultramarine blue apron, with a dull red skirt underneath. Her work sleeves are pushed up to lay both her weathered forearms bare to the elbow. Her strong-featured face and eyes are cast down, watching the milk as it runs into the pot.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) is in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen, with her coarse white apron rolled up to enable her to lean forward and down.

Aprons were also common in women working outdoors, such as gleaners.

Those in Jules Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) are using theirs to carry their gleanings. Most are frayed and tatty, faded blue in colour.

They’re being worn by the two women in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s October: Potato Gatherers from 1878.

Some aprons could have more than one purpose, and may need more careful reading. Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest. The family group in the foreground consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground. The daughter is finely dressed under her apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in domestic service in a rich household in the nearby town.

Another painting of Brendekilde’s from this period, his Springtime; The First Anemones from 1889, shows a young woman walking with a small girl in a wood in the early Spring. The woman is unlikely to be the girl’s mother. Instead, she wears the black dress and white apron of a woman ‘in service’, in this case probably as the little girl’s maid or nanny.

Camille Pissarro’s famous depiction of Apple Picking, Éragny, from 1887-88 shows a typical country scene, with three women wearing aprons, but the man still in a waistcoat and trousers.

A Kitchen is one of Maximilien Luce’s early Divisionist paintings, dating from 1888-89. It’s an unusual motif, showing domestic servants at work in the kitchen of a large bourgeois house, both of them wearing long white aprons. Kitchens have become one place where men are also expected to wear aprons.

Jehan Georges Vibert’s meticulously realist painting of The Marvelous Sauce from about 1890 shows its rotund hero wearing an apron and tasting a sauce with his chef in a palatial kitchen.

As they were painted at work during the late nineteenth century, it became clear how many men had been wearing aprons: blacksmiths, butchers, shoemakers, coopers and many other trades.

Maximilien Luce made many paintings of people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium. Several of these metalworkers are wearing heavy leather aprons to protect their bodies from burns and injury.

One of Constantin Meunier’s later paintings, Foundry from 1902, shows a worker stripped to the waist to cope with the heat, while wearing a protective leather apron.

In The Artist’s Model (1895), Jean-Léon Gérôme shows himself at work on a marble figure, and wearing a faded blue apron.

Sculptors and painters are kindred spirits. Although their tools and skills differ, they are all visual artists, and many have mastered both means of expressing their art. In today’s selection of paintings I include depictions of sculptors at work, rather than those merely showing the fruit of their labour in the form of sculpture.

The best-known sculptor in classical mythology is Pygmalion, whose quest for the perfect woman was only satisfied by the statue he made of her.

The Hand Refrainsis one of Edward Burne-Jones’s series telling this myth. Pygmalion stands back, his tools still in his hands and scattered at the foot of his work. Too scared to touch the statue now, he looks longingly at it, as if falling in love, which he did when it came to life.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at its composition, where the sculptor’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised his painting could be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so reversed the view.

His finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stays on the right side of contemporary standards of decency. His attention to detail is delightful, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing. For Gérôme recognised other stories about sculpture and seeing that could be brought in to enrich Ovid’s original narrative.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema imagined ancient Greeks admiring this painted frieze as it neared completion in his beautiful painting of its sculptor Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868). The admiring figures include Pericles (at the right), Aspasia, Alcibiades and Socrates.

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77) is the first of three paintings by Thomas Eakins showing William Rush, a wood sculptor, carving his Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain in Philadelphia’s waterworks, in 1808. The water nymph is an allegory of the Schuylkill River, the city’s primary source of water at that time.

Rush had been a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an enthusiast for the use of nude models in art, as was Eakins. This painting was therefore, at least in part, an attempt to promote Rush’s name, and the practice of working from nude models. Rush prepared thoroughly, as usual, in carving wax studies, and making a series of drawings and oil sketches.

Seated at the right of the model is a chaperone, more interested in her knitting. The model’s complicated clothing is hung and scattered in the light, as if to emphasise her total nudity (apart from a hair-band!), and the sculptor is working in the gloom at the left. Eakins anachronistically included several later works by Rush, as if to provide a resumé of his output. Unfortunately, the scattered garments didn’t go down well, and were deemed scandalous at the time.

Gérôme’s relatively small and simple painting of Michelangelo from 1849 shows Michelangelo in his dotage, hunched over and blind, being led by a young boy whose dress would have aroused his master’s homoerotic desires. The broken sculpture is the Belvedere Torso, a huge fragment of marble statuary so loved by the sculptor that it was nicknamed the School of Michelangelo. The young boy is leading his master’s hands to stroke and caress the marble, now that he was unable to enjoy looking at its classical and very male form.

This is perhaps the first step in his developing theme of sight, and the role of vision in establishing truth. In his blindness, Michelangelo can only feel what we can see, and cannot see the figure of the young boy. This is particularly appropriate to Gérôme, who later in his career became a successful sculptor himself, and whose later paintings referred to his sculptures and the act of creating them.

The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of Gérôme’s series of unusual compound paintings, at the same time self-portraits of the artist as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth. Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains naked. Apart from various diversionary entertainments, including a couple of stuffed birds and a model boat, there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand. Presumably this is a symbol of thanks from the artist to his model.

In The Artist’s Model (1895), Gérôme paints himself at work on his marble figure of Tanagra (1890), currently in the Musée d’Orsay, already included among the figurines in his painting Sculpturae Vitam Insufflat Pictura. He thus painted himself making a sculpture that he had previously painted in a painting as a sculpture. Not only that, but his model is his favourite Emma Dupont, who over a period of twenty years posed for many of his best-known Orientalist and other works.

Scattered in the image are reminders of gladiatorial armour and other props used for his paintings, one of his paintings of Pygmalion and Galatea, together with one of his polychrome sculptures of a woman with a hoop, at the right edge. In this single image, Gérôme has captured much of his professional career.

This wonderful Portrait of the Sculptor Nikolaus Friedrich (1912) at work wasn’t the first to be painted by Lovis Corinth, who had made a previous portrait in 1904, when the sculptor was young and muscular. Eight years later he’s seen in the midst of a broad and representative range of his work. Friedrich died two years later, when he was only 48.

Early in his career, Gustave Courbet planted a gaudily-dressed figure at the foot of some cliffs near his home town of Ornans, put a small mallet in his right hand and a chisel in the other, and painted The Sculptor (1845). The subject of this sculptor’s inattention is the emerging form of a woman in the rock just above his left knee, over a small pipe from which water is pouring into the stream.

Antoine Watteau’s tondo of The Monkey Sculptor from about 1710 is a singerie set in the sculptor’s studio, as if to say that even a monkey can be a good sculptor.