THERE were studies of fat legs and ample bosoms,’ novelist E. F. Benson wrote in 1922 in Miss Mapp, describing the studio of Tilling’s enfant terrible, painter Irene Coles: ‘The walls were hung with specimens of Irene’s art. There was a stout female with no clothes on at all, whom it was impossible not to recognise as being Lucy.’
Lucy is Irene’s maid and her model. She may be much more to her mistress. Undeniably, she is the avant-garde painter’s muse, transformed by Irene’s characteristically bold brushstrokes into a primitive Eve and a sister-hood of enticing and alarming fleshy women. Inspiration embodied, Lucy provides the catalyst that liberates Irene’s vision.
That Benson’s fictional painter should respond creatively to one woman is not a figment of the author’s imagination. Artists have consistently been inspired in this way. In some instances, the muse—male or, more often, female—sparks physical imagery in multiple works. Dante Gabriel Rossetti obsessively transformed Jane Morris into the archetypal pre-Raphaelite beauty, reimagined as goddess and queen—Proserpine, Astarte or Guinevere. A century later, David Hockney found similar inspiration in his partner, Peter Schlesinger, whom he immortalised, for example, in the iconic of 1966.
