Illustrator Harry Furniss suggested a ‘mechanical president’ for the Royal Academy of Arts, to cart away RA rubbish.
‘The women’s class seemed rather too much taken up with the art of the movement, the past seemed forgotten, the men’s with one or two exceptions, did not appear to be thinking at all.’
– William Orpen’s visitor’s report on the Royal Academy of Arts painting school, 1920.
In mid-June 1903, even rain-soaked London could hardly believe the weather. Camden Square saw over fifty-eight hours of continuous downpour, and now the winds were coming from the north. Cosy in his Regent’s Park abode, Harry Furniss, the celebrated caricaturist, metaphorically sharpened his pen to match his wit. It was time to put the finishing touches on Harry Furniss at Home, the second volume of his autobiography.
The Furniss residence at St Edmund’s Place was the scene of numerous literary shots fired at London institutions, most notably the Royal Academy of Arts. Furniss, an Irish-born illustrator, was one of the Academy’s fiercest critics. In 1887 he published The Royal Academy: An Artistic Joke, and in 1890, Royal Academy Antics, which skewered the work of leading ‘Rattle on Artists’ (his definition of Royal Academicians or RAs). This time he was coming to the defence of models, whom he saw as being underpaid and underappreciated:
The misinformed mix up the ballet girl with the chorus girls – those inactive masses of humanity whose only place is to ‘draw the youth in the stalls’, and who have no more to do with the theatrical profession than the members of an audience…
And, as the ballet girl is a woman of experience, so is the genuine artist’s model, and she should be respected, as her profession is as honourable and necessary as any other; but it is a profession, and that fact is too frequently overlooked, by those who think that to sit for an artist is merely to loll, languidly, about a sumptuous studio, sip afternoon tea, put on fine dresses, and get well paid for doing nothing.
I have found that there is a widespread impression, among women of all classes, that no training or qualifications are required, to make a useful model; they could not make a greater mistake than they do when they declare, as one often hears, ‘Oh, anyone can be a model’, except when they add the utterly unjust and unwarrantable rider, ‘that is, any one who has lost her self-respect’.5
Furniss was pushing back against broad misconceptions of posing in general, but the bulk of his ire was reserved for the Royal Academy insularity.
The first women modelled for Academy students as early as the mid-1700s, possibly 1768. Female sitters at that time were socially marginalised relative to their male counterparts. This continued through the early 1800s, when no real distinction was made between models sourced from brothels and those sourced from the ‘honest lower classes’ of London – although in fairness, all of the London art schools with life classes operated in much the same way.
While male models escaped this stigma from the earliest days, female life modelling began to attain professional stature only toward the end of the nineteenth century. It would be 1920 before the first models’ union was founded in London; many decades after Paris had done the same. The Association of Artists’ Models gave both sexes a much-needed professional framework for employment.
Illustrator Harry Furniss suggested a ‘mechanical president’ for the Royal Academy of Arts, to cart away RA rubbish.
Ephemera from the mid-1700s suggest that male models at the time were listed on payment receipts by name, while female models were not. London may have adopted this practice from Paris, where the first art academy was founded nearly a hundred years earlier, and Paris from Italy, where the first academy opened in Florence in 1648, the brainchild of Cosimo de’ Medici.
The sense of impropriety that clung to female sitters had nothing to do with how the women or students behaved, and everything to do with gender mores of the times. Many female sitters understandably preferred anonymity in light of these unfair strictures. Briefly, some women even wore masks while posing. Thus, the designation ‘Woman’ in the early account registers may have had a chivalrous origin – to protect the models from insinuation.
As the years went by, the Royal Academy took the lead by degrees. Every model’s name was recorded in its ledgers by the turn of the century, although those identified with both a given name and a surname were mostly male. Since female sitters were widely employed by that time, it can be assumed that at least some of the entries that lacked a full given name were abbreviated to shield the women.
From 1838 to 1869, Royal Academy life drawing was conducted in the cupola at the top of the National Gallery, where the Royal Academy was housed. The models marched gamely up those stairs to start each day, pausing to peek through the grillwork to the streets below. As for the students, those attending life classes were solely male until the late 1800s.
Decorum in the life rooms was rigorously maintained by the Academy, even when female models were sourced from brothels. To cool improper thoughts, 18ft of clear space between the disrobed model and the eager student was mandated. It would be 1893 before the Academy allowed its female students to set the plaster casts aside and sketch from a discretely draped nude male model.
There was nothing easy about modelling at the turn of the century. Ropes or slings were sometimes used to hold a model in a pose when muscle fatigue became unbearable. Men were expected to pose stock still for close to an hour without rest, women for almost as long, and children until they grew too fidgety. If a rest break was delayed for some reason, a model would have to stand up bit by bit to unbend painfully stiff muscles.
As the St James Gazette noted in 1904, ‘It is not an uncommon occurrence for a model to collapse in a fainting fit under the prolonged strain of keeping one position’ – although there was a silver lining. ‘It is almost unnecessary to mention that no female model wears corsets; she knows too well that an attenuated waist is of no value in studios, however dear it may be to the dressmaker.’6
In addition, the successful model had to accept being thought of as an inanimate object by those in the room. In 1909, an anonymous model commented on this exact subject in The Tatler, noting that the artists would openly air their private affairs before models as if they were a pet dog or a mistress, while models passed the time adding up the proceeds of the week’s posing in their heads.
It wasn’t all bad news for the women. The schools often paid female posers more than men, sometimes four or five times more for life classes, in part to compensate them for the implications of the job. Their importance to the teaching process, and the fact they were sourced from outside academia, gave the women a bit more negotiating power. Some male sitters were already on school payrolls as porters or other workers, and modelling was supplemental income for them.
Models who made the transition from the life classes to the studio were often subject to the same physical demands as at the academies. John Thomas Smith, a nineteenth-century keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, had some fun with renowned eighteenth-century sculptor Joseph Nollekens in his book Nollekens and His Times. As the story goes, a brothel madam angrily confronted Nollekens in his studio, shrieking:
Why the girl is hardly able to move a limb today. To think of keeping a young creature eight hours in that room, without a thread upon her, or a morsel of any thing to eat or a drop to drink, and then to give her only two shillings to bring home! … How do you think I can live and pay the income-tax?7
True or not (Smith had a bone to pick with Nollekens), this tale had its genesis in the real-life experiences of the life model.
In some ways, not much had changed by the early twentieth century. Cold, stiff and often painfully positioned to highlight certain contours of the body, models became adept at blocking out their surroundings. A notation from the Slade School archives describes what must have been a joyous change for its female sitters in the winter months:
Electricity arrives in 1928 in a form such as to augment the propulsion of hot water along pipes to be ‘applied to that portion of the room near the model’. The Ladies Cloakroom is the beneficiary of this as well, as the accommodation has been ‘much improved and extended’ into the space of the old heating plant.8
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Despite a welcome modernity, modelling brought some of its old traditions into the new century. This was particularly true in Paris, where models’ markets formed each day at the Boulevard Montparnasse and at the notorious Place Pigalle. Hopeful amateur models gathered around Place Pigalle’s large, hardworking fountain, where residents would wash fish in the basin, do their laundry and dispose of trash.
At night, Place Pigalle was a stew of the bizarre, the macabre and the titillating for those who dared to cross the thresholds of its nightclubs and cabarets. In the bright Parisian mornings, however, the men and women who gathered in Place Pigalle were prospective sitters. Most were Italians willing to pose for a franc less an hour than the French. Some dressed in period costumes to advertise a certain look for genre paintings.
The atmosphere at the models’ markets was a high-spirited mix of camaraderie and competition. It was preferable, but not always possible, to contract with the academies for work as a model. If that fell through, a good day at Place Pigalle or Montparnasse offered another possibility of income.
Meanwhile, the academic approach to training student artists – particularly in London – was increasingly under fire. The Royal Academy persisted in its practice of using antique subjects, Old Masters and plaster casts to teach draughtsmanship before moving to live models. Some felt that this clashed with the growing importance of natural human forms in modern art, and accused the practices of stifling experimentation. Avant-garde thinkers were particularly harsh in making the Academy a target for ridicule.
Boulevard Montparnasse (1914) was one of several popular models’ markets in Paris.
The Slade School was more successful at walking the line between the old and new guard. After 1900, the Slade proved open-minded in the way its curriculum used live models, with a focus on realistic anatomical depiction. This was advanced when Henry Tonks took the helm in 1918.
Tonks was a surgeon and a draughtsman who became a Slade tutor in 1892 and an official war artist in 1918, accompanying John Singer Sargent on tours of the Western Front. Later that year he accepted the position of Slade Professor of Fine Art, succeeding Frederick Brown.
Tonks had a long history with the Slade. He instructed William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and others – and did the same after the turn of the century with C.R.W. Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Carrington and their talented contemporaries. He often shook his head in despair at the artists he called his rebellious brood, but he kept in touch with many of them when they moved on.
Tonks did his best to instil the importance of anatomy in his students. His medical background, the sights he saw in battlefield hospitals, and the photos captured by handheld cameras – carried by soldiers for the first time – only deepened his obsession. A friend recalled: ‘He read everything that was written about drawing; he listened to all that his friends had to say; he thought about drawing, and he practised drawing, praying that the secret might be vouchsafed to him.’9
Only figurative art afforded the precision that Tonks demanded of his students. He had little time for controversial modern movements such as Cubism. In 1910 most Londoners still had not been exposed to modern art even though, in France, some modern movements were decades old by then. An exhibition arranged in part by Slade tutor Roger Fry, entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, brought paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, Manet, Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gogh to the Grafton Galleries that year. Tonks stopped short of forbidding his students to attend, but he made it clear how pleased he would be if they found something else to do.
Thus Henry Tonks and his passion for anatomy contributed to the demand for well-defined, classic life models at the Slade. It helped maintain economic opportunities for Italienne posers in London well into the new century, despite changing tastes in other parts of the world.
Meanwhile, Harry Furniss continued his tongue-in-cheek assaults on the Academy and its most eminent members. Nothing was sacred. Writing in Royal Academy Antics, Furniss made a sly commentary about the complex relationship between artists and models – made more gossip-worthy if the artist was a high-ranking Royal Academician.
Royal Academy Antics includes an account of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the relentless flirt and acclaimed portrait painter who became president of the Academy in 1820. Furniss wrote about Lawrence:
… when he undertook to paint the portrait of the Princess of Wales, it seems a pity that his zeal in the conscientious study of his royal model should have carried him so far into the privacy of the lady’s apartments as to make the subject of a ‘Delicate Investigation,’ and a world-wide scandal.’10
There is some truth to the account, and in this instance at least, the model may have had a hand in the scandal.