The Reading Girl by Théodore Roussel

The Reading Girl (1886), Roussel

Today's wallpaper demonstrates one of the easiest things to get a model to do, while she endures the tedious process of being captured on paper or canvas, which is to let her read a book. The fact that she is concentrating on a book also distances her from the viewer. There is no opportunity to engage the viewer directly, as her gaze is elsewhere. It adds a voyeuristic quality to the picture. This painting, by French born, but London based, artist Théodore Roussel, is a marvellous composition. Irish painter William Orpen called it the finest nude painting of the time, although its realism shocked many due to its lack of classical justification for the nudity.  The art critic of The Specator wrote:."Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist’s eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this; it is a degradation of Art."  It's actually a wonderful painting with Hetty's pale body glowing against the almost black background. Only the kimono (a reflection of Roussel's interest in Japanese art) gives any colour to the painting.  Roussel's friend Whistler called it "an extraordinary picture" ,

Hetty Pettigrew (1889) by Sambourne

The model in this painting is nineteen year old Hetty (also variously known as Bessie, Harriet or Nettie) Pettigrew (1867-1953) who. with her sisters Lily (b. 1870 and Rose (b. 1872), modelled for Whistler, Millais, Godward, Poynter. Leighton, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and others. Hetty was born in Portsmouth but the family were originally from the West Country. Millais said that the sisters were gypsies (although they themselves claimed aristocratic antecedents) and her sister Rose described Hetty as having a "cruel wit". They were generally considered, by those who painted them, as a bit of a handful. The  penniless Pettigrew sisters came to London in 1884 and their artist brother suggested they could make a living as models. He was right and they became the most sought after models in London, with painters offering them bribes to pose for them instead of other artists. The Pettigrew sisters commanded fees for modelling of no less than half a guinea a day, about twice what a housemaid would earn in a week.  Hetty became Roussel's mistress and bore him a child in 1900.  When Roussel's wife died in 1914, Hetty was shattered when Roussel married another woman and she never posed for him again.  Hetty was photographed, at the age of 23, by Punch illustrator and amateur photographer, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)  (Lord Snowdon's great-grandfather and furniture designer Viscount Linley's great-great-grandfather) and the photograph shows how well Roussel caught her features.