ARTISTS AND MODELS

Evening Star, Issue 20556, 7 August 1930, Page 17

ARTISTS AND MODELS

CURIOSITIES OF INSPIRATION Models are necessary to artists not only to ensure: accuracy pf form and tint.and tone, but often for inspiration (writes Norman.. Lilley, in tho ‘ Argus ’). Many inferior paintings owe half their dullness to inferior models. Romney would not have been the Rompey the,.world knows if he had missed acquaintance with the charm of Lady Hamilton. Rossetti was a. new Rogetti after he had found otherworldly beauty of Elizabeth Siddall. Fresh life seemed to enter the. work of Rubens ivhen there was Helena Fqurment to portray. Modern artists lament the impossibility of finding inspiration in the commonplace models available. The complaint is old, though there are many examples to show that it has been overcome.

Where was a capable late-Victorian artist to discover a model to suggest tho greatness of Napoleon? Orchardson’s daughter has been telling how her father solved the problem,, and in these . days of, feminine , achievement the solution does not seem surprising. Becoming acquainted with Mrs Lewis Wingfield, Orcbardson observed the striking likeness of her features to those of Bonaparte, and she agreed to be his model for the chief character in the familiar picture of Napoleon on the deck of tne Bellerophon. That was not the first occasion on which a woman had posed, for, the, representation of a man. The painting of Sir Galahad in armour by George Frederick Watts shows his very youthful wife Ellen Terry, who was to become the famous actressi The result' gives a better suggestion of tho idealism and romance of the, character than was likely to have beep obtained by other means. A schoolgirl tvas t)v? model for the, saddened Eros in ‘ Love Locked Out,’ a work of note by. tho American artist Apna Lea Merritt. On the other hand, the author of the life of Nollekens, one Smith, relates that as a boy in that .sculptor’s studio he was called upon occasionally to pose, and on one occasion his arms were models for those of the divine Venus. That reminds me of a statuette of the Apollo Belvedere I saw in the window of a Sydney curiosity shop. The price ticket described it as “This beautiful, Verms in . real bronze.” Because of the long fair hair, the painting, by Millais of the young Princes in the Tower. was formerly said to have been posed for by two girls, but that is not so. His son recalls that the originals were brothers who were taken to studios by their mother for employment as models in historical paintings, and that they were sufficiently mischievous in spite of their girlish locks. The hands are an important part of a true portrait, but in many paintings, especially those of the older varieties, they are not those of tho person who owns the face. Some, of the fashionable artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not trouble the sitter to remain, after the face bad'beep put on canvas with a rough indication of the form. The rpbps and pair of ideal .[lands, possibly modelled remotely on those of someone available in the studio, were addefj % a skilled, assistant, and they received final touches from ,the mister, pertain portraits by Honpiier were so idealised that Joshua Reynolds said that. he woiidered the painter Was not ashpmed to send .them out. w of his tudio. Yet it was not long afterwards that such unmistakably real portraits were being produced as the “James Wardrop ” of Raeburn, now a Felton Bequest painting. By some, of tho painters of the Victoriair era earnestness was exemplified in curious \yays. For his preRaphaelite picture of Ophelia gradually sinking into the brook as described in the play, Millais installed a largo tank in bis studio, with a primitive heating arrangement beneath. His model, Elizabeth Siddall, afterwards the wife of Rossetti, reclined in the water while Millais painted, and one day he worked so intently that ho forgot to renew the fire and the patient girl became chilled. There was no harmful result, though a relative of Miss Siddall expressed great resentment, and refused to be comforted by less than a monetary consideration. For ‘The Rescue,’ the picture of a fireman with children and their mother, now in the National Gallery, Millais placed pieces of burning wood on a sheet of metal on the floor of his studio, so that he might paint the flames. The unreal red glare that is seen in a large part of the picture was obtained from light showing through stained glass. The model for the mother was Mrs Nassau Senior, the wife of a man of letters of the time.

Often authors and fellow-painters have posed for artists, and have enabled them to present faces revealing more intellect than those of tho usual professional models. Keats and Wordsworth were painted by Haydon in a Biblical picture and Swinburne is shown as a rose-crowned reveller in a representation of a similar episode by Rosetti. Christina Rossetti was a model for her brother’s painting of the Annunciation. In one of the series of drawings by Millais illustrating the Parables (‘The Pearl of Great Price’)' portraits may be recognised by Walter Devcrell, tho painter of the ‘ Lady With a Parrot ’ in the Felton collection, and of Ford Madox Brown. I remember observing this fact in a copy of the volume which was a favourite possession of that too early lost Australian painter, J. J. Hilder.