Mistress, Model, Muse and Mentor: Women In the Lives of Famous Artists

By Robert Julian Hafner

This book is about the contribution of women to the lives of famous artists. Although women have given so much to these artists, this selfless contribution has been largely overlooked by art historians. In trying to redress such a huge imbalance, I have focused mainly on male painters. As a retired psychiatrist, I could not write about these artists, and the women who were their intimate partners, without considering their psychopathology. In writing about this I have struggled to avoid jargon and to ensure readability. The main focus is on the relationship between psychopathology and creativity, with some comments about the effects of psychiatric treatment on the creative process. The overall bias of the book is feminist, but my voice here is not strident. I have tried to comment sensibly on what modern women may learn from the truly heroic women who are the main focus of this work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483406886

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MISTRESS, MODEL,

MUSE AND MENTOR

Women in the Lives of Famous Artists

Robert Julian Hafner

Copyright © 2014 Robert Julian Hafner.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

I am greatly indebted to Wikimedia Commons, which contributed all the figures in the book free of any encumbrance.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0687-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0688-6 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 05/01/2014

Contents

Introduction

1 James McNeill Whistler: A Mother’s Boy?

Whistler’s Mother.

Paris

Heloise ‘La Grisette’

Joanna Heffernan

Jo, Realism, and L’Origine du Monde

Why Did Whistler Abandon Realism?

Whistler’s Other Women

Maud Franklin

Trixie Godwin

Oedipus and Fetishism

2 Walter Sickert, Jack the Ripper and Bohemian London

The Marriage of Walter and Nellie Cobden

Was Walter Sickert Jack the Ripper?

The Betrayal of Nellie Cobden

Life without Nellie

Camden Town, Nudes, and Naturalism

Walter’s Second Marriage

The Affairs Continue

Therese Lessore

3 Augustus John, His Sister Gwen, and Rodin

The Slade

A Near-Death Experience

The Arrival of Gwen

Gwen, Paris and Whistler

Augustus and Ida Get Married

Augustus and Dorelia

Gwen and Dorelia Travel through France

Experiments in Art and Domesticity

The Blended family in Paris

New Family Arrangements

Gwen John and Auguste Rodin

Gwen’s Replacement

Augustus Reinvents Himself

Augustus Plans to Live Apart from Dorelia Again

Life at Alderney Manor

The First World War

Augustus’ Post War Experiences

Gwen’s Religious Transformation

The War in France

John Quinn and Jeanne Foster

Life after John Quinn

If Gwen Had Lived in Yew Tree Cottage

Augustus Battles Alcoholism

4 Pre-Raphaelite Women: Slaves to an Ideal

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lizzie Siddal

Annie Miller

Lizzie’s Illness

Lizzie Meets John Ruskin

Life After Lizzie

Fanny Cornforth

Financial Success

The Ghost of Lizzie Siddal

Janey Morris

The Years of Decline

William Holman Hunt

Meeting John Millais

To the Holy Land

Fanny Waugh

John Millais, Ruskin and Effie

Euphemia Gray

Edward Burne-Jones

Georgie Macdonald

Mary Zambaco

5 The Bloomsbury Group: Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles

Roger Fry

Helen Coombe

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf

The Half-Brothers and Sexual Abuse

Vanessa’s Passage to Adulthood

The Royal Academy

Clive Bell and Bloomsbury

Marriage to Clive Bell

Falling in Love with Roger Fry

Duncan Grant

Duncan’s Early Artistic Development

The influence of the Stracheys

Early Love Affairs

Vanessa Falls in Love with Duncan

The Omega Workshops

The First World War

Life at Charleston

Vanessa’s Further Development as an Artist

The Deaths of Roger Fry and Julian Bell

The Euston Road School

Bunny and Angelica Fall in Love

The Suicide of Virginia Woolf

Somehow, Life Goes On

Duncan Endures

6 Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and the Heide Circle

Sunday Reed

Male Domination

Sunday’s First Marriage

John Reed, Marriage, and Sam Atyeo

The Creation of Heide

Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan Arrives at Heide

Sidney Joins the Army and Finds the Wimmera

Sidney Goes Absent Without Leave

Marriage to Cynthia Reed

Travels in England and Europe

The Nolans Live in England and America

Cynthia Kills Herself

Sidney Marries a Third Time

Albert Tucker

Joy Hester: Rebel with a Cause

Joy and Bert: an Unlikely Affair

Albert Tucker’s Debt to Joy and Sunday

Joy Hester and Sunday Reed: a Lifelong Love

How Bert Survived the War, and After.

The Birth of Sweeney

Joy Leaves Melbourne and Her Family

Joy’s Life with Gray Smith

Albert Tucker Stays in Europe

Bert is Rescued by Mary Dixon

Marriage to Barbara Bilcock

Sunday’s Life after Sidney Nolan

The Birth of Heide II

7 Drawing it Together

Models and Supermodels

How Does a Model Become a Muse?

The Artist as Genius

Does Depression Contribute to Creativity?

The Effects of Treatment

The Role of Partners

Some Final Words

Annotated Bibliography

Introduction

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the other founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood used to roam the streets of London looking for stunners: young women of outstanding beauty and poise. When they spotted one – and their standards were of the highest – they went to great lengths to persuade her to model for them. Some of these women agreed to pose, and some became their mistresses. A few morphed into muses, and an even smaller number became mentors. Although most nineteenth century painters recruited their models in more conventional ways, the women that they chose enjoyed a similar fate.

Very occasionally, a model achieved enough status to become part of history. Lizzie Siddal, much favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites, is one of these. Enough has been written about her to ensure that she is known not just to art historians, but to a wider public. Sadly, the great majority of these artists’ models have passed into obscurity.

This book aims to remedy this. It is about what women have given to the artists who were their intimate partners, a contribution that has never been adequately acknowledged. These women are the unsung heroes of art history. Justice demands that their story be told, and some of it, at least, is told here. I have included women painters mainly for the sake of contrast. Compared with men, the place of intimate relationships in their lives and art is very different. Gender stereotypes and traditions have led women artists generally to carry the burden of domestic duties in addition to the demands of their art. Male artists have usually been spared this burden by the women in their lives. Although, with the help of the Feminist movement, the tyranny of rigid gender stereotypes has been much reduced, it has not vanished. In some areas it remains, leaving women victims not of patriarchy, but of powerful commercial forces that seek to shape their lives. Today’s supermodels are important here, and nineteenth century stunners can in some ways be compared with them, a link that I develop in the last chapter.

The artists selected were all born within the past two hundred years. To go further back would compel me to deal with huge changes in gender roles and general social structure. These historical changes would be central in their own right. Of course it is true that gender roles have evolved substantially over the past two centuries. But this evolution has been much discussed, and is, I believe, well enough known to the readers of this book. Where it requires special attention, it will not be ignored.

There is a bias towards British artists, first because England is my country of birth, and second because British art history seems especially rich in women whose contributions to their partners’ artistic endeavours are not well enough known. This partly reflects a historical English tendency to overvalue gender stereotypes, epitomised by the Victorians. I have included a chapter on Australian artists because I have lived in Australia for much of my adult life, and because they illustrate especially well the issues at hand. My career as a psychiatrist has yielded a further bias. Whenever I am able sensibly to do so, I include insights based on the almost thirty-five years that I spent in clinical psychiatric practice. I have tried to focus on the contribution of psychopathology to the act of creation. Psychiatry remains as much an art as a science, and so some speculation is inescapable. In this I have tried to avoid extravagance.

Rather than interrupt the reader’s flow with numbered references in the text, I have added an annotated bibliography for each chapter at the end of the book. I am hugely indebted to the biographers listed in it. Special mention must be made of Frances Spalding and Janine Burke. The former has written about the Bloomsbury Group, and the latter about Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and the Heide circle. Both have devoted much of their professional lives to this crucial work, each in several volumes. These books are all beautifully written, so much so that it was sometimes a struggle for me to write in words other than theirs. Of course I had to find my own words. Finally, almost all of the images not reproduced in the book are readily accessible on the internet.

CHAPTER 1

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James McNeill Whistler: A Mother’s Boy?

James McNeill Whistler, born in America in 1834, had a huge influence on British art. Some of this was transmitted by his student Walter Sickert, who formed the seminal Camden Town Group in 1910. In 1913 this morphed into the London Group, crucial to the development of British art over the next 15 years, and with a much longer ripple effect. Women powerfully shaped the art of both Whistler and Sickert.

Whistler’s Mother.

Whistler’s painting ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1: The Artist’s Mother’ (Fig. 1) was first exhibited in 1872, when the artist was 38 years old. It hangs in the Louvre, and remains one of his best known works, colloquially referred to as ‘Whistler’s Mother’. Whistler’s relationship with his mother, Anna Mathilda, was deeply ambivalent. Anna, born McNeill, became Major George Washington Whistler’s second wife at the age of 27. The major was 34. Both he and Anna Mathilda were of patrician American ancestry, although they had close relatives in Britain. Anna was a devoted Episcopalian, and ensured that James and his two-year-younger brother William shared her religious devotions. Weekends were spent largely at church or preparing for it. This religious strictness was combined with a strong emotional and physical affection for her elder son who was, by all accounts, a charming, handsome lad, and her favourite. Although of robust temperament, James was prone to bouts of illness, some quite prolonged, during which his mother nursed him with affectionate and intimate care.

James’ father George had left the army in 1833, age 34. He began a new career as a railway engineer, a profession that took him to Russia in 1842, to be joined a year later by his family. Although they were all based in St Petersburg, George was mainly away, supervising the building of a railway between St Petersburg and Moscow. Even before that George had been a largely absent father, and this doubtless contributed to James’ close, ambivalent relationship with his mother. Any chances of James resolving issues of paternal identification were destroyed when his father died suddenly on April 9th, 1848, aged only 49. The precise cause of his death is not known, but he had been weakened by a bout of cholera. His father’s death made it almost impossible for James to resolve his problems with paternal identification, leaving him with what Freud termed an Oedipus complex. Now almost a cliché, the concept nonetheless remains invaluable. Its essence is the failure to abandon a primary identification with the mother and replace it with a paternal one.

Anna, James and William returned to America in 1849. In 1851 it was decided that the proper thing for Major George Washington Whistler’s elder son was enrolment in his father’s alma mater, West Point Military Academy. James entered on the first of July 1851, age 16 years and eleven months. He somehow survived an utterly disastrous three years, during which he accumulated 218 demerit points, 18 over the permitted maximum! He was discharged on June 16th 1854. He had been taken seriously only in drawing classes, where his extraordinary talent was recognised. Elsewhere, he rebelled, lasting as long as he did only because of his family connections and his charm and wit. That his rebellion was directed, at least unconsciously, towards his late father, is suggested by his change of name. He entered West Point as James Abbott Whistler. Abbott was a family name on his father’s side. At age 17 he adopted his mother’s maiden name, McNeill. At first, he used the name Abbott as well, but later dropped it entirely, except when signing legal documents. From a psychological perspective, he is symbolically rejecting his father’s persona, and confirming his primary identification with his mother.

As an adult, Whistler’s behaviour was notoriously effeminate. Today, it would be described as the highest of high camp. His voice was artificially high-pitched and piercing. An acquaintance complained that ‘even genius could not excuse such a voice’. He laughed in a contrived falsetto. His dress was obsessively fastidious and outlandishly eccentric, but always impeccable, as was his personal hygiene, which bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. At his famous brunches, he sometimes kept guests waiting for two hours while he completed his bath and donned his costume. In spite of a pronounced effeminacy, he was strongly heterosexual, and a notorious womaniser. A photograph taken in the late 1870’s shows a very handsome face with twinkling eyes and the hint of a smile. Although often rude and acerbic, he could be utterly charming, and there is no doubt that many women found him irresistible, notwithstanding his modest height of five feet five inches.

Paris

Whistler drifted aimlessly after his discharge from West Point. This infuriated his mother, who pushed him into a job, obtained through favours, with the US Coast Survey Office in Washington. He joined in November 1854, and was assigned to the Drawing Division, an area that seemed ideal for a young man who spent so much time sketching and painting. But he was impossibly unreliable, arriving late and leaving early. In January 1855 he reported for work on only 7 occasions. He resigned on the twelfth of February.

Finally, Whistler decided to defy his mother’s wish that he pursue a conventional career. With the aid of a $450 loan from a sponsor, he left for Paris in late September 1855 aboard the SS Amazon. In early November, after staying for three weeks in London with relatives, he arrived in Paris. It is noteworthy that during his four years there, he attended art school (Gleyre’s Academy) rather spasmodically, and for only the first two years, later preferring to spend his time in the Louvre and other public art museums, teaching himself. As well, he selectively absorbed the influence of peers and mentors.

Heloise ‘La Grisette’

By the summer of 1856, Whistler had found himself a Grisette, Heloise. The term Grisette was applied to adventurous, independent minded young women who embraced a Bohemian lifestyle. Usually from a working class background, and struggling financially, they commonly worked as seamstresses or milliner’s assistants. Many were employed as artist’s models, often providing sexual favours as well as posing. But Grisettes were not prostitutes: they sought emotional and intellectual connection with the artists for whom they modelled, and played an active role in the Parisian Bohemian community.

Heloise was unusual for a Grisette in that she was well-educated, vigorously participated in often fierce intellectual debate about art and philosophy, and loved poetry. She was renowned for her fiery temper, and throughout the Bohemian community was known as ‘la tigresse’. Whistler called her ‘Fumette’, a double entendre which captured her explosiveness and also rhymed with ‘Musette’, a character in Henry Murger’s ‘Scenes de la Vie de Boheme’.

Fumette doted on Whistler, but was jealous to an almost pathological degree. In a fit of rage about a suspected infidelity, she tore up many of his drawings. This, it is said, reduced Whistler to tears, and he was not a lachrymose man! His etching ‘Fumette’, done in 1858, reveals his dislike of the sentimental in painting, but at the same time beautifully illustrates Heloise’s character: feisty, uncompromising, honourable, but with an inner sensitivity. She was generally regarded as rather plain, but in Whistler’s portrait her whimsical half-smile makes her attractive.

During the two years or so that they lived together on the Left Bank’s Rue Saint Sulpice, Heloise contributed hugely to Whistler’s life and art. She helped him to become part of the Latin Quarter’s Bohemian community, within which he could get feedback about his art, and absorb what he wanted from the work and the ideas of other Bohemian artists. She modelled for him, and this could be very demanding. Whistler, even at this early stage, often required many sittings in order to complete a portrait, or a work in which figures were central. It is certain that she commented on his work, and he seems to have valued her opinion.

Whistler was a fraud in the sense that he pretended to be poverty stricken when in reality he received regular funds from a wealthy American relative. This fraud was, he believed, a necessary part of his acceptance as a true Bohemian. Doubtless he provided Heloise with financial support. Even so, it is perhaps surprising that they cohabited for more than two years, given the very stormy nature of their partnership. If we reflect for a moment on the notion that Whistler’s relationship with his mother was highly ambivalent, and that he experienced her as highly overprotective, then his connection with Heloise makes sense. Her near-pathological jealousy was perhaps the equivalent of his mother’s over protectiveness, and their frequent fights were an ‘acting out’ of his maternal ambivalence.

In the autumn of 1858, Whistler fell in love with a woman known as Finette. He began a relationship with her while still living with Fumette, whose discovery of the affair confirmed her suspicions of his infidelity and enraged her almost beyond measure. It caused her, finally, to leave him. Whistler’s relationship with Finette seems to have been based mainly on physical attraction and although they had frequent sex, there was little of the emotional and intellectual intimacy that he and Fumette had shared. Finette was an attractive woman who worked as a dancer, specialising in the cancan. Her work meant that she was unavailable in the evenings. This freed Whistler up to socialise with friends and flirt with other women. But he was careful not to provoke Finette. For example, in the spring of 1859 he submitted to the Paris Salon – the equivalent of the British Royal Academy – an etching of Heloise which he tactfully rendered anonymous, calling it simply ‘Portrait de Femme’. Since Heloise was named in previous works, it seems likely that Whistler was anxious not to remind Finette of Fumette.

The sexually passionate nature of Whistler’s relationship with Finette is illustrated in a painting that he did in late 1859, simply entitled ‘Venus’. It is an intimate portrait of a woman lying on a bed. It is also a reminder of the many, many hours that Finette must have spent patiently modelling for Whistler. Soon after completing this work, Whistler abandoned Finette. He had just met, on a trip to London, his next love. He left for London on 20th December, 1859.

Joanna Heffernan

Deborah, Whistler’s half-sister from his father’s first marriage, had married Seymour Haden in 1847. Seymour came from a distinguished, wealthy medical family and gained his own medical degree in 1843, age 25. He had inherited from his father a large house in London, 62 Sloane Street, and Whistler spent much time there. Seymour was a talented artist. He specialised in etching, and acquired an international reputation in this field. His encouragement of the young Whistler, his prolonged mentorship of him, and his financial support, were of crucial importance.

When Whistler arrived in London in December 1859, he stayed with Deborah and Seymour. He had fallen in love with Joanna Heffernan, a professional artist’s model, who herself had some talent as a painter. It was said of her:

She was not only beautiful. She was intelligent. She was sympathetic. She gave Whistler the constant companionship he could not do without.

Joanna, or Jo as she was generally called, came from an impoverished Irish background. Her father, a teacher of calligraphy, had an alcohol problem and was considered disreputable. Polite society viewed women who modelled, especially in the nude, as little better than prostitutes. All this was a huge problem for Whistler in his relationship with the Hadens. He was afraid to introduce them to Jo, in spite of her beauty, intelligence and poise. This led to systematic deceit: Whistler would tell the Hadens that he was going to work in his studio, but this was often code for a visit to Jo.

In the spring of 1860 Whistler bought a pretty eighteenth century cottage at 7, Lindsey Row (now Cheyne Walk) in Chelsea. When he and Jo moved in together, around the middle of 1860, the problem with the Hadens became worse. By now, Seymour had met Jo. Privately, he was a regular visitor to Whistler’s home where he socialised with her freely and enjoyably, treating her as an equal. Publically, however, Seymour would not acknowledge Whistler’s relationship with Jo. He refused to allow Deborah to visit the Whistler household at 7 Lindsey Row..

Matters came to a head when Whistler’s mother, Anna Mathilda, arrived to stay at Sloane Street on the 10th of October, 1863. She was now 56, in poor health, and with failing eyesight. Whistler had insisted that Jo move into nearby lodgings before his mother arrived. But even though she had moved out, Seymour continued to ban Deborah from visiting 7 Lindsey Row. He argued, apparently, that a house in which such an improper relationship had existed could never be a place in which a respectable woman such as Mrs Seymour Haden could be seen. This was nothing less, according to Whistler, than a personal theory of permanent pollution by fornication, and he was enraged by it. In truth, had Deborah visited, Seymour’s utter hypocrisy would have been exposed: it would have been impossible to conceal Seymour’s regular visits from her. In any event, she ignored the ban, and visited the house on Lindsey Row regularly. So angry was Whistler about Seymour’s attitude that he and Seymour almost came to blows over the matter. A loud argument began in the etching room at the top of 62 Sloane Street. It continued down the stairs to the front door, and ended with Seymour throwing Whistler out of the front door, minus his hat! Their relationship cooled after this, and they abandoned their close artistic collaboration.

Later in 1864, Anna Mathilda moved out of the Haden’s Sloane Street residence and into the cottage at 7 Lindsey Row. At Sloane Street, she had found the strained relationship between Deborah and Seymour difficult to cope with. Whistler introduced her to his friends, and she became especially fond of the young poet Swinburne, who treated her as a mother figure. She nursed him during one of his illnesses, perhaps reliving the experience of nursing her elder son as a child. Whistler finally abandoned his deceit about Jo, who became a regular visitor to Lindsey Row. But Anna never accepted her, and Jo’s visits caused tension in the household. Anna left London in the late autumn of 1865 for extended treatment by a world-renowned eye specialist in Coblenz.

Anna Mathilda’s departure meant that Jo could move back in to 7 Lindsey Row. Such were the social pressures on women to conform to Victorian social conventions that even Jo yielded to them. She undertook a gender-stereotyped role, providing domestic services to Whistler as well as sex and emotional support. In addition, she spent almost endless hours modelling for him. There is no doubt that she contributed hugely to his work, freeing him from domestic tasks and unwanted social distractions. As his artistic muse, she contributed directly to his creativity, both by inspiring him and by giving him an honest opinion about the quality and nature of his works. She abandoned her own painting because it was incompatible with the various roles that she played in Whistler’s life. Jo was truly Whistler’s mistress, model and muse. To a modest but real extent, she was also his mentor.

Jo, Realism, and L’Origine du Monde

In August 1861, Whistler had taken Jo to France. Originally planned as a brief holiday, the stay lasted more than nine, months, including one or two brief business trips back to London. The couple spent much time with Gustav Courbet, whom Whistler had first met during his Bohemian days in Paris. Courbet was the foremost proponent of Realism, and claimed Whistler as one of his students. We shall see that although Whistler later disputed this, Courbet was crucial to the development of his art.

In the autumn of 1865, James visited his mother in Coblenz, where, during her treatment, she was accompanied by William, Whistler’s younger brother. William had fought on the losing (Confederate) side in the American civil war, but managed to escape, carrying important dispatches, through Union lines to New York. From there, under an alias, he sailed to England, arriving in London in April 1865. His wife had recently died, so that all his closest relatives were now based in London, where he himself decided to settle. It may be that William’s unexpected arrival unsettled Whistler, evoking guilt about the hardships and losses that his brother had endured, and about his own failure to become involved in the conflict. Certainly, this notion helps to explain the bizarre events that were shortly to unfold.

After visiting his mother and brother William in Coblenz, Whistler joined Jo in Trouville, Normandy. Courbet was there also. Although Courbet was now 46, and had put on weight, he remained a hugely attractive and charismatic figure. He had always been very fond of Jo, and during the time that he, Jo and Whistler spent together at Trouville, he became infatuated with her.

Jo posed for Courbet many times, and she is depicted in one of his best known portraits, La Belle Irlandaise, otherwise simply called Jo. It is one of four surviving portraits that he did of her. The image of a beautiful, red-haired Jo shows poignantly the depth of Courbet’s feelings for her. The painting remained a favourite of his, and he kept it for the rest of his life. Once, he refused an offer of 5,000 francs for it, a sum sufficient to resolve his then serious money problems.

It is almost certain that Jo and Courbet became lovers, but probably not until after Jo had been abandoned by Whistler. He left her because he was convinced that she and Courbet were having an affair. It is possible that they were, but both vigorously denied it. The most compelling evidence for an affair was Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde’. It is a close-up view of a woman’s genital area. The subject is near-naked, lying on a bed with her legs spread apart. The genital area is the central focus of the painting, the eroticism of which is highlighted by the fact that the remainder of the work shows only the abdomen, a glimpse of one breast, and the upper thighs. The work is both profoundly intimate and graphically detailed, so that Whistler, seeing it, would have known that Jo was the model. Any doubts that Whistler might have had about this would have been dispelled by the fact that Jo is easily recognised in another of Courbet’s erotic works, Le Sommeil", or