The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 (review)

In 1856, the energetic Léon de Laborde (diplomat, traveller, conservator and writer), suggested a nineteenth-century version of outsourcing as one solution to France's artistic ills. In Laborde's opinion, French painters and sculptors were making do with a sorry selection of artists' models. Socially and even ethnically inferior (Jewish models were supposedly abundant), the lowly origins of these service workers in Parisian studios infected their every painted or chiselled representation. A work of art was supposed to transport the viewer, not leave her with the uncomfortable realization that many a former labourer or prostitute had been immortalized on canvas or in marble. An eagerness to strike 'affected poses' made this awareness more grating. The strength of Laborde's allergy to mugging bears out the relevance of Michael Fried's work to Waller's concern for 'the praxis of the pose'. In addition, Paul Duro, drawing on Marc Gotlieb's study of Ernest Meissonier, has recently underlined the extraordinary measures taken by the latter at mid-century in staging the model via a set of re-imagined Naturalist practices. Laborde's exasperation thus reflected widespread contemporary concerns about the status of the model. Laborde however, was moved to wonder if the representatives of 'beautiful races' — Italy received reverential mention, although his menu was global — could don the attire of Achilles or Venus with greater verisimilitude.

As economic circumstance would have it, Laborde was to see 'beautiful' faces appear in Salon paintings over the years to come: Italy's rural poor increasingly joined their French counterparts then streaming into a Paris under Haussmannization. Waller skilfully describes the assimilation of colourfully dressed immigrants to a market where genre paintings of rustic Italians were old favourites (hardly the tonic for French art blithely imagined by Laborde). Théophile Gautier's praise for 'noble rags' over the crinoline's hegemony drew upon deep wells of belief in a native Classicism. Raphael's La Fornarina had it (albeit in genius-sapping form), why not the 'modèle (italienne)' of the Second Empire? Waller contrasts this benign stew of stereotypes with the 'emerging racial ideologies' against which the 'modèle juive' had to contend. In a discussion resonant with Carol Ockman's work on nineteenth-century expressions of the belle Juive, acculturation's uneasy history becomes the context — and as is the case throughout, Waller's Herculean work in the archives is palpable. This does not entirely make up however, for a certain lack of concerted engagement with the work of other art historians, notwithstanding an acknowledgement of general methodological debts in a lucid Introduction. The allure of the biographical is admirably shunned: some of Waller's terms are contemporary, others are of her own careful fashioning, but all stem from a consideration of métier as the 'collective body of models,' from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic (the book does not end on the dot of 1870). Waller thereby finds that rare thing, a research topic in French nineteenth-century art previously left comparatively untouched by scholars, making her book an invaluable contribution to the field. It is too bad that Ashgate did not serve Waller better with illustrations: they are formatted in rather cumbersome groups.