The Artist, the Studio & the Model: The Carracci to Courbet. 7

Two Models in the 19^th Century Studio & Art World

“I recognised, in the woman with a snake, that Maryx with her pretty postures. Jeanne, that wretched Jeanne who tortured him [Baudelaire] in all sorts of ways.” Madame Baudelaire.¹

To end we follow the trajectory of two women who modelled for artists, one of whose name and career has only recently been brought to light by feminist art and literary historians. The fortunes of these two models- Joséphine Marix (1822-1891) and Apollonie Sabatier (1822-1890)- are woven into the public and private spaces of Paris, its painting and literary culture, as well as the social history of the country where the modern model was born. Born in 1822 in Paris to Marix and Gertrude Bloch, Joséphine Bloch’s family situation is not known; but she became famous in her time modelling for painters like Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche; she posed for the figure of “Fame” or “Renown” in Delaroche’s hemicycle (above) in the hall of distribution in the École.² When a very young girl, Marix also posed for Ary Scheffer in 1836 as Mignon in the painting of the same name. By 1845, Marix – as she was simply known- was living in the Hotel Pimodan, 17 Quai d’Anjou with a painter Boissard, visited by the cream of the literary avant-garde such as Gautier, Baudelaire,³ Balzac; also many famous artists paid court to her- Delacroix, Meissonier, amongst others.⁴ In 1847 Marix met a foreign nobleman, Baron Herman d’Ahlefeld; they had a daughter in 1849, married and moved to Denmark where they had four more children. She returned to Paris where she died in 1891. In the above quote Baudelaire’s mother seems to have conflated several models, Marix and Jeanne Duvall- mulatto mistress of the poet- but it is known that the woman who modelled for Clésinger’s infamous Woman Bitten by a Serpent of 1847 was Apollonie Sabatier who was one of three models in Baudelaire’s complicated life.⁵ According to the writer Gautier, he met Baudelaire while living in the Hotel Pimodan “in the middle” of 1849. During this encounter two models reclined on sofas: “Maryx” and an unnamed one who was obviously Mme Sabatier who Gautier connects with the scandalous writhing woman at the Salon of 1847.⁶ Also born in 1822, Aglaé- Joséphine Savatier (adopting Sabatier at the start of her Parisian career) became the mistress of Meissonier and Richard Jackson (later Wallace of Wallace Collection fame) before becoming the lover of the sculptor Clésinger who eventually left her for Solanges, the daughter of the novelist Georges Sand. Clésinger is supposed to have cast Sabatier in plaster for the controversial sculpture. She probably met Baudelaire at the Hotel Pimodan in 1843, though some say as late as 1851, when she became the mistress of Alfred Mosselman of the Pimodan group who actually paid for Clésinger’s sculpture.⁷ The couple have been identified in one of the most famous paintings of the century which features another model- Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio of 1854-55 where they stand in front of Baudelaire who sits and reads a book.⁸ The model at the centre of Courbet’s painting is Henriette Bonnion who also posed for the artist’s controversial painting The Bathers which was a deliberate affront to the École. Much admired by anti-academic painters like Delacroix and Manet, Courbet’s use of such an unidealised model and painted copy served notice that the days of the classical academic model were drawing to a close.⁹ Indeed, the nude in the Bathers may have been based on a study after nature by the photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, though Courbet’s studio was ransacked and all his photos destroyed, so it is difficult to identify the source. Sources notwithstanding, in the words of one scholar Aaron Scharf, Bonnion’s rotund figure “marks Courbet’s replacement of antique idealisation with the realism of contemporary photography.”¹⁰

1Quoted in Lathers, Bodies of Art, 109 where she notes Mme Baudelaire may have confused the names of these women due to the confusing nature of accounts of models available to her.

2Waller, Invention of the Model, 87.

3Baudelaire moved to a building next door to the Hotel Pimodan -previously Hotel Lauzun- in 1850, though he probably met Marix who was brought down from her attic, thus scandalising the respectable guests of Baron Pimodan in 1844, Claude Pichois & Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire, trans Graham Robb (Verso, 1989, original 1987), 120.

4On models at the Hotel Pimodan, Lathers, Bodies of Art, 109-141.

5The other two were Jeanne Duvall and Marie Daubrun, Pichois & Ziegler, Baudelaire, 198-217. Jeanne is the most famous Baudelairean woman and was painted by Manet; Marie was an actress that the poet met around 1854.

6Lathers, Bodies of Art, 117: “The “x” of her name marks the Jewish Marix as an unusual “exotic” or “Oriental” model- it is a singular name for a singular character.”

7Lathers, Bodies of Art, 125; Pichois & Ziegler, Baudelaire, 207, 1845-1847.

8The canvas originally contained a likeness of Jeanne Duvall, but it was painted out at the poet's request.

9In addition to Henriette Bonnion, it is thought that Courbet’s sister modelled the young woman of the embracing couple, Waller, Invention of the Model, 75.

10Ibid, 74.