The Artist, the Studio & the Model: 19th Century to Lucian Freud. 4

Between Paris & the Slade.

“….it is precisely these points which make the difficulty in drawing from nature, and which render it necessary for the student to have some acquaintance with the general character of the human figure before attempting the study of the living model.” Sir Edward Poynter.

There is a link between Trilby and the Slade School of Art because Edward Poynter (1836-1919) who became the first professor at the Slade in 1871- before he departed for the R.A.- trained in Charles Gleyre’s (1806-1874) studio in Paris; the bohemian scenes in Du Maurier’s novel are based on Du Maurier’s own time with Gleyre whose pupils included Gerome, Monet and Whistler who became friends with Du Maurier.¹ During his time at the Slade, Poynter recommended the “free and intelligent manner of drawing” practiced in the French studios (above). Poynter encouraged “careful copies of classical casts and of the nude carried out in powdered black or brown chalk [and] worked with leather or paper stumps, and heightened with white chalk if on coloured paper.”As for administrative requirements, students would not be examined on admission; women and men should have the same opportunities; and the teachers had to be practicing artists. Poynter soon left the Slade to take up the more venerable position of PRA (President of the Royal Academy); he was replaced by Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) who was nominated to continue Poynter’s French methods in 1876, though Legros “did comparatively little to encourage painting from life at the Slade.”² This naturalised Frenchman who couldn’t speak a word of English insisted his students drew freely with the point; they also had to “build up their drawings by observing the broad planes of the model.” Established firmly within the French nineteenth-century school of line drawing, Legros was part of a tradition stretching back to Ingres which would influence several generation of Slade students. We get a good idea of Legros’s teaching methods from his pupils including William Rothenstein, though some artists like Sickert criticised Legros heavily. By the time Augustus John arrived at the Tate in 1894, Legros had been retired for a year. His place was taken by Frederick Brown (1851-1941), another Paris-trained Englishman – studios of Bouguereau and Bastien Le Page- who continued those methods at the Slade. Brown was aided and abetted by Henry Tonks (1862-1937) from the Westminster School of Art; Tonks was a surgeon, but had become partial to the artistic life to the extent that he asked his patients to pose as models!

1The Slade opened in 1871, and it took its name from Felix Slade, a rich art connoisseur who had bequeathed the sum of £35,000 in 1868 to create chairs of art at Oxford, Cambridge and the University of London. The Oxford and Cambridge chairs were solely for lecturing; Ruskin took the Oxford professorship. In London, the executors of Slade’s will founded a ‘Felix Slade Faculty of Fine Arts’, and University College found the sum of £5,000- the Slade School that was built was situated as part of the UCL college quadrangle off Gower Street.

2Postle and Vaughan, The Artist’s Model, 34.