The Female School of Art in London began using clothed models in 1866.
‘You shall seek my footprints in the Bloomsbury dust and your sole pleasure shall be to burn me in effigy.’
– Artists’ model Iris Tree writing to art critic Clive Bell, 1915.
On a cold, bright London day in May 1905, Ellen Stanley Smith left Marylebone Police Court a free woman, acquitted of having stolen ten shillings from her landlord’s room in St John’s Wood the prior month.
She had been charged, indicted and released upon proving that she was employed as a model by the Royal Academy of Arts, where she earned more than £10 a month. Her good fortune was sealed when the painter Edmund Blair Leighton strode into court, moustache bristling, to declare that the accused was of excellent character.
Thus 21-year-old Ellen Stanley Smith passed in and out of history in the space of three weeks. In doing so, she accomplished something that almost all of her contemporaries failed to achieve – she put a name to her work as an artists’ model. We don’t know if she had the poignant features of one of Leighton’s medieval maidens, prompting him to speak out on her behalf. We only know her identity because she was a woman acquitted of theft.
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Anonymity was very much the life of most artists’ models in early twentieth-century London. There were exceptions of course: the commissioned portraits of privileged men and women, the notorious models who blazed through Paris, London and New York. And the wives, mistresses, children and friends who posed through loyalty or love – these were known by name.
For the most part, however, the sitters were everyday men and women trying to make ends meet. Many were chosen by chance, or because they were related to a working model. This was particularly true of figure models. If one was fortunate enough to become an artist’s favoured sitter it could lead to work with a broader group, but public recognition would seldom follow.
Artists were fickle creatures, and often short of money. This made studio work sporadic. The Royal Academy of Arts, Slade School of Art, Saint Martin’s School of Art and other academies were generally more reliable sources of income for models in the new century. A popular young sitter might spend more ‘school hours’ inside those walls than she did on her own education.
Scrutinised during long hours in the classroom, models became known largely by their attributes – a classic profile, long waist, slender hands or an ability to stay perfectly still. Personal identity was not important. In fact too much information about a model could hamper creativity.
Even the compensation was nameless and faceless. The Slade handled it in typical generic fashion, writing ‘Model’ or ‘Woman’ on its pay receipts into the twentieth century. The Royal Academy was an exception, taking the unusual step of recording models by name in large, leather-bound registers. Cursive notations such as ‘Sculp. Draped’ or ‘Painting Nude’ documented the model’s work next to the payment amount.
Men had a large presence in the modelling profession both before and after the turn of the century; in fact older, more weathered male models were in demand. This was less true for women, at least initially when femininity was idealised. It wasn’t a perfect solution to subsistence, but in the context of the times it offered freedom from the drudgery of factory work or domestic service.
The Female School of Art in London began using clothed models in 1866.
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Public recognition – if and when it came – could sometimes be used to advantage, although male models had the upper hand here. A court report in the London Evening Standard on 17 January 1901 noted that Antonio Corsi, a well-regarded artists’ model, was charged with stealing and pawning two expensive rings. He was shown leniency because ‘the man had lately been driven to extremities by domestic trouble’. This was typical of the tolerance exhibited by the courts toward men ‘of character’ who claimed trouble at home.
For women in the modelling profession in England respect was a slow process, but then that was the case for all Edwardian women who worked. There was no tidal wave of acceptance until the first war; instead, single women were being nudged bit by bit toward employment.
It started in the late 1800s, when middle-class women began moving into clerical jobs with the advent of typewriters. Small keys required dainty fingers. The work was monotonous and poorly paid, but it was seen as a symbol of liberation. The introduction of the modern bicycle was another nudge; it gave women a way to travel safely between home and workplace.
The bicycle was also important in academia and myriad other jobs not always accessible by public transportation. A feeling grew that there might be a better life for the taking – and it was felt most strongly in the lower-middle classes, where women worked to survive.
All of this was encouraging, but not for married women. If you had a husband in pre-war England, you were still expected to be a stay-at-home wife and mother if economically feasible. This idea persisted in even the most unconventional and bohemian corners of London.
The artist and model Nina Hamnett – bohemian to the core – wrote frankly about feeling stifled during her brief marriage to Edgar de Bergen in the early 1900s:
Edgar had made friends with some people whom I considered dull, common, and boring, so he often went out with them and I stayed at home. He seemed to think that I should always be at home waiting for him and once, when I went out to dinner with an elderly man I had known for years, an awful argument [with Edgar] took place and we threw saucepans at each other. I got so bored with this and being so poor … that I fell in love with a tall dark man whom I had met at the Café Royal.1
Hamnett’s story, while a bit extreme, captures the constraints that British society imposed on married women at the time. For an unmarried woman, however, it was perfectly acceptable to contribute to the household coffers. Posing could bring in a couple of pounds a week, and it came with the benefit of being able to say you were ‘artistic’. It was flattering and a little bit scandalous to be a model – the ideal occupation to satisfy a young girl’s sense of adventure or her empty stomach.