The English Model: Trilby
“ I pose...in the altogether.” Trilby.1
France has quite a number of novels, stories dealing with painters and their studios, of which the most well-known are Balzac’s Le chef d’ oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece” 1831), the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon (1867), a story about a Jewish model, and Emile Zola’s L’Oeuvre (1886), the tragic tale of the fated painter Claude Lantier. Within this stream are also found novels written by British writers about artists living and working in Bohemian Paris. Trilby published serially in Harpers in 1894 was by the cartoonist George de Maurier; it sold 200,000 copies in the US alone. It’s eponymous heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall works as a model and is loved by a variety of painters; when she first meets them she says she poses “in the altogether” i.e. in the nude. The novel famously features the character Svengali who hypnotises Trilby into becoming a diva; Svengali is one of Du Maurier’s greatest creations who has become synonymous with the idea of the seducing, dominating guru. Hypnotism would have been known to Du Maurier because of the experiments conducted on patients by Charcot at the Saltpêtrière hospital.2 As Albert Vandam observed, On one occasion Charcot selected for his subject “ a girl of great plastic beauty...the well-known Elise Duval, the favourite model of MM Gerome and Benjamin Constant.”3 Apart from Svengali and Trilby, the novel also contains three British painters working in a rented studio in Paris: “Little Billie,” Taffy and the Laird, who with their English, Welsh and Scottish nationalities make up a “United Kingdom” of painters in Paris.4 A student in the novel- Lorrimer- is thought to have been based on Sir Edward Poynter who we shall meet again when we consider the fate of the model at the Slade where he taught.5
1George Du Maurier, Trilby, (Oxford University Press, 1995).
2Jane Desmarais, “The model on the writer’s block: the model in fiction from Balzac to du Maurier” in Model and supermodel 47-61, 69, 58. n. 17. Charcot actually posed his patients like models; in the studios women were occasionally asked to pose in a similar way, i.e. hysterically. In her introduction to Trilby, Elaine Showalter says: “In a sense, an artists’ model was the ideal hypnotic subject, since she was already practising a form of self-hypnosis.”
3Quoted in Elaine Showalter’s introduction to the 1995 edition of Trilby, xxi.
4Jane Desmarais, “The model on the writer’s block,” 60, n. 17.
5“A most eager, earnest, and painstaking young enthusiast, of precocious culture, who read improving books, and did not share in the amusements of the Quartier Latin, but spent his evenings at home with Handel, Michel Angelo, and Dante, on the respectable side of the river.” Trilby, 94.
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