Revellers are depicted resting between dances at the Chelsea Arts Ball, Albert Hall, London (1912).
‘I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball … when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me.’
– Alfred Hitchcock, on being inspired to create the camera effect for the 1958 movie Vertigo.
It was the Chelsea Arts Ball of 1910, the first held at the Albert Hall, and over 4,000 revellers in fancy dress were crowded onto the parquet floor. Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson wiped away some unladylike perspiration from under the kerchief of her cowboy costume. The organiser, George Sherwood Foster, had outdone himself, but the temperature was rising. Who can dance in this human jungle, Lady Constance thought, and why did I wear long sleeves? At least that big chicken over there is hotter than I am.
Granted, the poultry was a stroke of genius. The novelist Arthur Applin was strutting by in head-to-toe black feathers as Chantecler, the magnificent rooster protagonist of Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name. It was all the rage in Paris. Behind Applin came the actress and model Viola Tree dressed as the Ballad In E Flat.Viola was the very image of propriety, staying close to her father Sir Herbert Tree. But where was younger sister Iris? The black cat perhaps, certainly not the elephant. The beautiful, bohemian Iris Tree, eccentric artists’ model, would never choose a baggy pachyderm disguise.
The newspapers were quick to dub the event a triumph, ‘the greatest fancydress ball ever held in London’. Later, the narcissistic Bright Young People would host Impersonation Parties (Elizabeth Ponsonby came dressed as Iris Tree), and later still the Chelsea Arts Ball would be called ‘the most scandalous event on the social calendar’. But in March 1910, a bold young lady could tuck her hair under a cowboy hat for some harmless fun.
In the early twentieth century, the Chelsea Arts Balls were widely attended by the three types of working models at the time: sitters (in academia and studios), performers (in music halls, nightclubs and theatre), and fashion mannequins.
The love affair between models and the stage flourished in the early decades of the new century. Music halls, a nineteenth-century offshoot of pub theatres and supper rooms, charged a low admission. A few precious minutes of stage time offered exposure to a large crowd. The public could enjoy a Cockney sing-a-long or a performance of ‘singing swells’ for a pittance.
Revellers are depicted resting between dances at the Chelsea Arts Ball, Albert Hall, London (1912).
Music-hall entertainment had one criterion – fun – delivered through humour, dance and song. Over time, fun was interpreted to include a farrago of variety acts: jugglers, cancan dancers, midgets, educated elephants, illusionists, hot air balloons and other wonders of late-Victorian and Edwardian times. As Charles Dickens Jr. (son of the novelist) wrote in his Dictionary of London, ‘nothing comes foreign to the music proprietor’.
Models began to participate in English music halls in earnest at the turn of the century when women became more prominent on stage. The goal was to graduate from the chorus to a role as a featured singer or dancer. For the beautiful but less talented, there were the popular ‘living pictures’ of models posing in classical or patriotic tableaus. Some models found this preferable to London’s nightclub scene, and equally effective as a way to catch the attention of artists and earn extra money.
A rare few went on to cinema or legitimate theatre, where modern women were asserting themselves in contemporary productions. ‘We have our new woman, it is true,’ wrote a reviewer in The Globe in June 1912, after seeing The Amazons at the Duke of York’s Theatre. ‘The 20th century variety that does not regard it as a necessary part of the game to wear bloomers.’
The dream of being a great stage beauty was further ignited when the sensational Evelyn Nesbit secured a contract to appear in the British musical revue Hullo, Rag-Time! in 1913. Nesbit was the Gibson Girl ideal come to life. Her appearance drew raves, and when Oscar Hammerstein caught her act at the London Hippodrome, he immediately offered her $3,500 a week to perform in New York. What Soho model toiling in a chorus line could resist imagining herself in Nesbit’s shoes?
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Despite being largely anonymous as individuals, artists’ models as a group had become ‘a thing’ by the turn of the century, due in no small part to the theatre. The idea of a desirable young woman trying to get by in a man’s world had been intriguing the public since 1895. That was when An Artist’s Model, a two-act musical comedy, was first staged. It was followed by light comedic fare in the same vein – A Gaiety Girl, The Shop Girl, The Circus Girl – all of which were more respectable than old-style musical farces.
In 1913, the prolific Nita Rae wrote a play entitled Only An Artist’s Model, making the transition from comedy to drama. It enjoyed success in London and on tour. When the production travelled to Glasgow, management’s dissatisfaction with certain cast members resulted in a succinct advertisement for three replacements: ‘Wanted, through disappointment, good Juvenile Leading Man; young, must have power and pathos; also tall. Dramatic Chambermaid with plenty of dash and go. Fast Woman part. Age, height, recent photo, and last three refs.’43
While the storylines on stage were pure fiction, there was just enough real-life success to keep hope alive for young women thirsting for the footlights. One notable success was Meum Lindsell-Stewart, a young typist who crossed over from modelling to theatre, song and dance. In 1918 she appeared as ‘Envy’, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, in As You Were at the London Pavilion. That same year Lindsell-Stewart bore a child with the sculptor Jacob Epstein, for whom she also modelled. Epstein’s wife Margaret accepted her husband’s affair and agreed to raise the child, Peggy Jean, in their home. The artist would complete more than a dozen studies of the little girl.
As a side note to ‘Envy’ – if the irony didn’t strike a chord with Mrs Epstein during Lindsell-Stewart’s tenure, it surely did in 1920 when her husband’s next great love came along. Kathleen Garman was an intellectual flapper half Epstein’s age. She would become the artist’s ‘second wife’ – his mistress until his death – and bear him three children. It was a rough start in the Epstein household. After six months of seething, Epstein’s wife locked Garman in a room and shot her. Fortunately it was just a flesh wound in the shoulder.
Although Epstein moved on from Lindsell-Stewart, the one-time typist didn’t suffer from her association with the sculptor. She had a stellar professional arc as a model and an actress (she was called ‘one of the best of the younger brigade’), and as an editor of women’s poetry in the 1940s. Lindsell-Stewart was much more than just a pretty face – and yet without the Epstein connection, she may have struggled to find fame.
Lilian Shelley had a similar arc at a similar time in history. Shelley was triply blessed with pocket-sized Renaissance beauty, a pretty singing voice, and perfect comedic timing. She performed in music halls as the comedienne Crazy Lilian Shelley and toured in regional revues. At the Golden Calf Shelley would often come into the audience to hob-nob with the artists, her black hair gleaming against the golden Egyptian headbands she favoured. She eventually fell out with Frida Strindberg over non-payment of fees, but her reputation as a model was established by then.
Shelley posed for two exceptional sculptures by Jacob Epstein, who recalled the sittings well. ‘Of Lillian Shelley I made two studies, an early head and later an elaborate bust,’ Epstein would recount decades later. ‘Of the head I remember that when I was exhibiting it, the model turned up while I was in the Gallery, leaning on the arm of a gentleman who turned to me and said self-righteously, ‘Yes, I can see that you have depicted the vicious side of Lillian.’ I answered that he ‘knew her perhaps better than I did. … In truth I had made a head expressive of innocence and sweetness. A short time later the gentleman who had so offensively rebuked me was kicked to death in Cornwall by the miner father of a girl he had attempted to seduce.’44
London-born Betty May (née Golding) was not a full-fledged model, singer or dancer, but was a little of all three. She grew up in Canning Town in extreme poverty, sleeping on rags and living for a time in a brothel with her estranged father. May was a volatile, green-eyed dervish who spent her life trying to climb the ladder into proper company. She was doomed from the start.
Betty May’s exotic features caught the interest of Augustus John, Michael Sevier, Jacob Epstein and the painter Jacob Kramer, among others. Kramer’s 1919 painting The Sphinx likely shows either Shelley or May – both sported pitch-black hairstyles and headbands at the time. May claimed that she was the sitter, but the face is too stylised to tell if it depicts her olive skin and huge, dark eyes, which in any case are closed in the portrait.
May had the beauty, the figure, the sinuous movements and the ferocious magnetism to make a success of professional modelling, and the camera loved her. But her drug and alcohol use, her predilection for violence and her dabbles in the occult all served to distance her from the acceptance she seemed to crave. She disappeared from London for a number of years before dying in obscurity.
When Epstein decorated the massive underground columns of the Cave of the Golden Calf in 1912, he created plaster sculptures in brilliant colours intended, as he put it, ‘to capture the youthful and the elderly rich’. He found the London club scene personally distasteful, but was tolerant of the late-night behaviour of models such as Shelley, Dolores and May. However, he placed a much greater value on anonymity.
I would prefer to work from models who are not known, but often a pestiferous journalist will nose around and get on familiar terms with the models. He mentions them in the press. That very soon turns their heads, and they become characters with ‘a public’ … Lillian [sic] Shelley, the temperamental, was of course beautiful, and likewise Dolores was beautiful; but their devotion to art ceased when they left the model’s stand. Betty May also shared in their beauty and notoriety, and I did two studies of her. The notion that I worked only from models of this kind was severely commented on in the newspapers, and one of my exhibitions was characterised, I recall, as nothing more than an exhibition of semi-Oriental sluts. How pharisaic!45
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Not all the women who spanned the studio and stage at this time were a cautionary tale. Perhaps genetics helped. Chattie Salaman (née Wake) was descended from Hereward the Wake, the leader of local resistance against the Norman conquest of the eleventh century.
As was common with many well-to-do young women at the time, Salaman had a cross-cultural upbringing. She attended drama school, but it was her training at the Slade that put her in contact with the world of artists and modelling. She posed draped in orange robes for Duncan Grant’s Berwick Church decorations (Grant would recall her ‘kneeling on a garden dictionary’ as the Angel Gabriel) and her soft features inspired works by other Bloomsbury artists, as well as Augustus John. Later, Salaman’s daughter Merula married Sir Alec Guinness, keeping acting in the family.
Another woman who successfully spanned stage and studio was the elegant Viola Tree, daughter of two thespians, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Helen Maud Tree. Viola’s quintessentially English features were immortalised by John Singer Sargent, Roger Fry and the caricaturist J.J. Binns.
She must have been too busy to sit still for long – her impressive professional credentials include numerous stage appearances and the management of the Aldwych Theatre in London. She went to America to storm Broadway and the Ziegfeld Follies, and upon returning to England, became a director, film actress, screenwriter and author in the 1920s and 1930s.
Portrait of Iris Tree: the poet and model burned bright on the London arts scene in the early twentieth century.
Viola had two legitimate sisters: Felicity, also an actress, and Iris, a much-sought-after artists’ model. The Tree sisters also had seven half-siblings, courtesy of their father’s aversion to monogamy, some of whom made a living in the creative arts.
Iris Tree may have found her sister a bit intimidating, or perhaps she was too rebellious to go straight into the family business. Instead Iris became partners in crime with her girlhood friend, Nancy Cunard. The two lived a wild early life, and Tree gained a reputation for being unbalanced, holding all-night parties with Cunard at a secret flat in Fitzroy Place. She indulged in bad behaviour with the Corrupt Coterie and was an unapologetic sybarite before the age of 20.
In 1915, an 18-year-old Tree put pen to paper to scold a much-older Clive Bell for ignoring her advances. She scrawled:
You are a very foolish man to have rejected the steely sword-play of my glances and the passionate pressure of my hands … Do not neglect the Chelsea embankment, you may see myself and [Augustus] John blown there with the dissolute leaves in a savage wind, black-hatted and black-kerchiff ’d – And you may see a streak of orange liquid across the sky, a tangerine plume nodding over the river to remind you with a pang of the high-lights in my fringe.46
Tree sat for Bell’s good friend, Roger Fry, that same year. In the painting she leans back with a sidelong look, refusing to make eye contact with the artist. If this took place in the midst of rejection, Tree may have been telegraphing her reluctance to give up on Bell without a battle. One of Nancy Cunard’s lovers, the writer Michael Arlen, penned Piracy in 1922 about the parasitic London café society, and tellingly based the character of Lois Lamphrey on Tree.
A prolific artists’ model, Tree would go on to sit for Amedeo Modigliani, Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Man Ray, Alvaro Guevara, Nina Hamnett and Augustus John. She became close to the Bloomsbury Group, which led to portraits by Vanessa Bell (Clive’s wife), Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, among others. Lady Ottoline Morrell photographed Tree at Garsington Manor and Charleston Farmhouse.
Tree never lost her sharp wit or taste for adventure. During a visit to her sister Viola in Italy she wrote of ‘eating bohemian spaghetti’. She was also an accomplished poet, publishing her first book of almost 100 poems in 1920. Making it clear that she feared being shackled by the mores of the times, she wrote:
You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.47
Twice married, Tree went on to write Hollywood screenplays, tour in theatrical productions and appear in a few films, including in a thinly veiled role as herself in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Through the lens of time, however, Iris Tree is best remembered as a muse to many of the greatest artists of her time – a testament to how she prevailed through all the nonsense to take a stance as a modern woman.
When the Tree sisters were still girls, a daring 27-year-old was creating a commotion that bridged art, photography, stage and fashion. Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson was a renegade aristocrat, the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Cromartie. She was a champion swimmer, a big game hunter and an avid performer of classical dance. As a noblewoman, she placed herself squarely on the wrong side of the Court of Edward VII by dancing barefoot and scantily clad in London theatres.
A demonstration of barefoot dancing by Constance Stewart-Richardson, published in her shocking book, Dancing, Beauty, and Games (1913).
Just months after Stewart-Richardson attended the 1910 Chelsea Arts Ball as a cowboy, King Edward VII died of complications from poor judgement – namely, smoking dozens of cigarettes and cigars a day. By that time Stewart-Richardson’s name had been struck from the royal records and she was a social pariah. This merely encouraged her to try vaudeville, and she eventually found a more open-minded reception in America.
The Russian sculptor Prince Paolo Troubetzkoy captured Stewart-Richardson’s expressive figure in bronze in 1914 at a life-changing time for her. She was widowed that year by the war, and had posed twelve months earlier for a series of dramatic dance positions. She published these in a sensational book entitled Dancing, Beauty, and Games. Always fearless, ‘Lady Connie’ told an American newspaper in 1921, ‘Every woman should learn to dance, and certainly dance with as few clothes on as the law would allow.’48
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It is worth noting that models were not the only ones at the intersection of art and theatre in early twentieth century London. Artists were there too, employed to create scenery and costumes for stage productions, and not always with the best results.
Consider the lot of Alfred Wolmark, a Russian artist living in London in 1914. Wolmark was the plaintiff against Mr W.H. Baker of Regent Street. As given in court testimony, Wolmark was asked to create scenery and costumes for a play called The Birthright. The artist produced preliminary models, which he claimed were approved. Mr Justice Horridge, upon seeing a photograph, commented that they looked like a Futurist painting.
The defendant contended that the designs were ‘of a nature not understood by the public’ and denied any breach of contract. Things got worse for the artist as more witnesses took the stand. As reported:
Mr Kenvyn, an actor, said the play was staged at his model theatre, and when the curtain went up the scene was greeted with laughter … Mr Paterson, a theatrical contractor, expressed the view that if the plaintiff ’s model was reproduced on the stage the audience would make rude noises, even if they did not throw things.49
Alfred Wolmark was awarded a token £6 in damages for his artistic vision.
The influence of the footlights on women’s fashion could be equally amusing. Witness the chanticleer hat for ladies in 1910. When this cringe-worthy fashion statement made its appearance in London, Paris and New York, it was as a tribute to the must-see play, Chantecler. Chantecler fever spawned fancy-dress parties, satires and animal-themed imitations in every corner of popular culture.
There are a number of chanticleer-hatted women pictured in 1910 photographic portraits, but apparently not in paintings. Perhaps the sitters and artists had an aversion to immortalising dead bird parts. By winter the chanticleer hat had thankfully run its course, but not before the ladies of London opened their morning newspapers and read a tongue-in-cheek poem entitled ‘Chanticleer Et Al.’ As reprinted in London from The New York Times, a wit had written:
A chanticleer hat, with the tail and all that,
And the chanticleer jacket are here.
And similar styles from the coop and the sty
Are certainly bound appear.
In keeping with all of those fashionable fads
We will learn how to cackle and cluck.
And professors will teach us at so much an hour
To waddle along like a duck.
While the women are wearing the latest designs
To be furnished by rooster and hen,
A beard like the wattles a gobbler displays
Would be fetching and fine for the men,
But to copy the mode of the bird that we serve
At holiday time there’s no use,
For the person that wears these sartorial freaks
Alas! is already a goose.50