BRITAIN’S FAVOURITE ARTIST’S MODEL

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 25 May 1936, Page 7

BRITAIN’S FAVOURITE ARTIST’S MODEL

NEW ZEALAND GIRL PAINTED 5,000 TIMES EARNS £1 A DAY (By Air Mail —From a Special Correspondent.) LONDON, 2nd May. More than one picture hung in this year’s Royal Academy, which opened this week, displays the striking and perfect figure of a New Zealand girl, Marguerite Salle. She was born at Ruakaka, New Zealand, where she used to deliver mail with a pack horse. Now she is the most soughtafter artists’ model in England. Marguerite Salle is known to almost every artist in the world. She is a favourite model for poster artists.

She has flaxen hair, blue eyes, an exceptionally fine forehead, a lithe but substantial figure. She has sensitivity yet stamina, too —for posing is not easy work. She has been cast in bronze, chipped out of marble, painted in oils, drawn in charcoal, limned in watercolours. She has to change her personality as the chameleon changes its spots. One day she is sipping cocktails on the Riviera, a modern hat perched jauntily over her hair. In the afternoon, perhaps, she will be an Indian Princess, waiting for her lover in some leafy arbour. In the evening, a mother with hordes of children, preparing a meal in a humble cottage room. It’s all in a day’s work! She has been painted five thousand times, excluding the innumerable sketches, and paintings made by students’ classes, for which she often poses. Pictures of her hang in the Royal Academy, in the Paris Salon, in Melbourne Art Gallery, and her figure appears on the Melbourne War Memorial. “Modelling is no easy task,” says Marguerite. “It is true, I need never be without work, but there is a limit to what one can do. “Whether one poses for famous people or students —and I enjoy one as much as the other —the pay is usually the same, half a crown an hour. And that means eight hours’ work to make a pound a day! “One can’t work six days a week. It would be impossible to do it and keep healthy. “But it is interesting work, even if it is hard. It is fascinating to speculate as to the possible success which awaits a particular artist, and to follow his progress through the years. “I have seen a few once-callow students, take the world by storm.”