The Artist, the Studio & the Model: 19th Century to Lucian Freud. 5

The English Model: Drawing after Nature at the Slade.

“The impact of the Slade School on art education went far beyond artistic technique or the question of access to the living model to issues of class and of gender. For the first time women were permitted to work in public from the semi-naked living model, a right which was not extended to women students at the Royal Academy until 1894- by which time women were working from the nude male model.” Martin Postle.¹

Despite Dyce’s attempts to restrict the use of the live model earlier in the century, it began to encroach more and more on art school teaching, though it was invariably policed to the extent that the Royal Academy set up a Royal Commission to investigate teaching methods. Earlier in defiance of the Academy’s conservatism, the eccentric artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) had introduced the living model at the Manchester School of Design, and the Master of the Figure School at the Somerset House School of Art Design- John Rogers Herbert-put the live model above drawing the cast collection resulting in his dismissal in 1845, though in 1873 he was to express to the Royal Commission his disquiet about the nude female model’s use in academy schools.² In fact, the live model- either female or male- had to continually battle with antique and ideal art, even at the Slade, one of the most progressive private schools due to the ideas of Poynton and his colleagues. Yet even Poynter in one of his inaugural lectures felt obliged to draw the student’s attention to the problem of reconciling the real and ideal, studying the human form via the antique as well as after living models.³ This tension continued at the Slade though as Frances Borzello says the Slade was innovative in making “life drawing accessible to its students much sooner than the Academy schools did.”⁴ Still, there were restrictions initially: men and women only drew together in the Antique Room; the Life Class was forbidden to women students until the end of the nineteenth-century. Consider the difference between two exceptional Slade artists of different genders, but the same generation: Sir William Orpen (1878-1931) and Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970). Despite being the same age as Orpen who used a model at the Slade, Emily Scobel to pose for his “The English Nude,” Knight did not share the privilege of drawing from the live model, so she invited a man- Jack Price- to pose nude for her in her home studio.⁵ And her telling self-portrait (above) with a female posed nude (Ella Naper) eloquently conveys the dilemma of women artists apropos the live model, tensions not wholly resolved in the modern age despite the less puritanical attitude to the nude in art education.

1Postle and Vaughan, The Artist’s Model, 14-15.

2Frances Borzello, The Artist’s Model (London, 1982), 73.

3Poynter quoted in ibid, 73-74: “ ...although you will find nothing in the antique which you cannot find in nature, there is much, even in the best models, which you will not see in the antique, and 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.”

4Ibid, 71.

5Postle and Vaughan, The Artist’s Model, 63. When Knight’s picture went on display, the critic from the Telegraph dismissed it as “vulgar” while the Times opined that it was “regrettable,” Kathryn Hughes, “Dame Laura Knight and the nude controversy,” Daily Telegraph, 11^th July, 1913.