The relationship between artist and female sitter, and the manner in which this has affected the art produced, has informed our views of women themselves over the last half century. The sitter was often described as a muse. Manet’s Olympia was based on his muse Victorine Meurent, who he originally met on the street and on whom he based nine of his greatest paintings. But Manet was in a long tradition that dates back to the Renaissance. For example, Caravaggio enjoyed a long relationship with Fillide Mellandroni, featuring her in many of his works. She went on to become a famous courtesan, but the painter’s use of her image tells us something about the balance of power between artist and sitter which was to be replicated down the centuries. Take for instance Martha and Mary Magdalen, painted in 1598. This depicts the moment at which Mary Magdalen gave up her life as a prostitute. It is ironic that Fillide, herself a prostitute, was used to illustrate the renouncement of the life of a whore. Martha is shown counting on her fingers the reasons why a life of piety is preferable, but Mary herself is already committed, with the orange blossom flower symbolizing her future chastity, and the broken comb representing the end of her devotion to earthly vanities. However much the artist is telling us a moral tale, his relationship with his sitter remained one of service-provider and client. A great painting was produced nevertheless, but in it, a woman of easy virtue is only redeemed in our eyes by her willingness to become a bride of Christ.
In the Victorian era, the urge to sermonize was not diminished. Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted in 1852, shows us another moment of realization. She is a kept mistress, shown at the point of enlightenment at the error of her ways. The fact that Hunt used his own mistress, Annie Miller, to pose for him is also enlightening. It is as if the artist not only wanted to preach to a wider audience about the right path that young women should take, but was also ‘instructing’ his own muse and potential wife (although, in common with many other similar artist / model relationships, they never actually married). The painting is rich in symbols. The cat toying with a bird and the discarded glove point us to the perils of captivity and a life thrown away, while the unspooled thread in the bottom left-hand corner speak of an unravelling of the proper order.
There is a similarly themed work by Augustus Egg, entitled Past & Presentwhere the woman of the story is both metaphorically and literally ‘fallen’. Immensely popular in Victorian Britain, such socio-moralistic pictorial tales appealed to the public with an appetite for soap-opera-like drama and moralising. In the scene, a dumbstruck patriarchal head of the family has just discovered evidence of his wife’s infidelity and we witness the immediate aftermath of her fall from grace. While he sits clutching the letter that revealed her adultery, at the same time his foot tramples on an image of her lover. The apple represents the story of the Garden of Eden (also pictured in the painting on the rear left-hand wall) where Eve was tempted and succumbed. The apple or heart is cut in two, with one half fallen to the floor and the other half stabbed by a knife, while the children play obliviously with a house of cards to indicate that the future of their cosy bourgeois domesticity is equally precarious. The woman’s hands appear to be bound by her bracelets, and it is as if she has already been condemned and is now a prisoner, convicted by her own weakness. The right hand rear wall features a painting of a shipwreck (representing their marriage), so the moral of the tale is rammed home with little subtlety. However, while this artist preached to us about the damage women could do to undermine the sanctity of family life, there was also hypocrisy. For The mid-nineteenth century male middle-classes, the keeping of mistresses and the use of prostitutes was considered entirely reasonable and acceptable. The nineteenth century proto-feminist Caroline Norton astutely observed: 'the faults of women are visited as sins, the sins of men are not even visited as faults.' (Norton 1863)[1]
Hunt and Egg’s contemporary, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had similar preoccupations. His unfinished painting Found, of 1859, shows a young woman who we presume has run off to the city to a life of prostitution and who is now ‘found’ by her former girlhood boyfriend, perhaps come from the rural village in which they grew up together, and who has chanced upon her while bringing his cart into the city. She turns away in shame, her face a sickly green, while he tries to pull her away from her life of dishonour, their hands entangled at the centre of the painting, representing the struggle between competing moralities. To the right, a netted calf symbolizes the ‘innocent’ woman trapped in a life dedicated to commercial sex, while the pattern on her dirty dress signifies her deflowering. The model was Fannie Cornforth, herself a prostitute, and there is again an irony in the use of a sex-worker as a model employed to exemplify the rightness of one life and the wrongness of the other. The fact that the artist has inserted a phallically shaped bollard into the painting might point to his own confusion and hypocrisy over his own desires and urges while using such a model or muse to lecture a wider audience.
Rossetti was a man of obsessions, not least with his model Elizabeth Siddall, whom he pained many dozens of times. Again however, the relationship was one-sided. A simple hat-girl when they first met, Rossetti drew her into his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood world and ‘used’ her to the extent that she died tragically young of a self-administered overdose of laudanum. One of his other obsessions was with the character Beatrice, as described by the Italian poet Dante, who also died young. In Beata Beatrix, Rossetti conflates these twin passions into one work which he described not as a representation of the death of Beatrice ‘but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden transfiguration. Beatrice is rapt visibly into heaven, seeing as it were through her shut lids.’ (Fredeman 2002-10).[2]The painting is also an homageto Lizzie whose likeness he captured here shortly after her death, a guilt-ridden expression of grief and angst. The symbols express this with some poignancy. As he explained: ‘A radiant bird, a messenger of death, drops the white poppy between her open hands’ which is perhaps an oblique reference to the opiate that killed Lizzie. The red of the bird stands for the colour of love while the green robe stands for spring and hope, but the purple ground is the colour of suffering. The artist here is attempting to immortalise Lizzie as Beatrice (and himself as Dante?), his beloved model and wife, but he is also attempting to deal with his own remorse. He feels contrition, but cannot simply render Lizzie as a common shop-girl, but needs to elevate her status as a way to do justice to her memory and perhaps to purge his own soul of culpability.
In the twentieth century, the use and abuse of models did not abate. Egon Schiele met Wally Neuzil in 1911 and painted her portrait in 1912, but continued to exploit her in many much more explicit images thereafter. They were lovers and lived together during the time that Shiele was convicted for sexual offences (he seduced a minor and was also accused of disseminating pornographic material), for which he was sent to prison. Wally was largely responsible for Schiele’s business affairs, dealing with galleries and collectors, paying his rent, and in essence, managing all his commercial affairs. He promptly dumped her a few years later, in favour of a girl thought to be much more decent and respectable.
[1]Norton, Caroline. Lost and Saved.London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863.
[2]Fredeman, W.E. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.Cambridge, 2002-10.
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