Artists' Models

The relationships between artists and models are notoriously complex. They are structured by shifting power dynamics. They encompass the vulnerabilities of exposure and the trials of physical exertion. They test personal and professional ties. Research into these dynamics and the lives of models has moved us far away from the concept of the ethereal muse effortlessly inspiring an artist to celestial heights. 

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s upcoming exhibition Manet: A Model Family (10 October 2024 – 20 January 2025) promises to expand our understanding of these relationships by focusing on Édouard Manet’s use of non-professional models from his family and inner circle. Please join the Impressionist Futures Group as Allison Deutsch chairs an online conversation between Diana Seaver Greenwald, the exhibition’s curator, and Susan Waller, specialist in the artist/model transaction.

Biographies

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian, who is currently William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. An expert in nineteenth-century American and French art, she has curated six exhibitions during her tenure at the Gardner, including editing three accompanying exhibition catalogs: Manet: A Model Family (2024), Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer (2023) and Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums (2023). She is also the co-author (with Nathaniel Silver) of Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (2022). Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings. In addition to being a curator, her academic research uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Her first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University.

Susan Waller is an independent scholar and art historian art whose research focuses on the social history of artists and models in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is professor emerita of art history at the University of Missouri—St Louis. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD from Northwestern University. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to essays in journals including Oxford Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, Art History, and Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, her publications include two books--The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870 (Ashgate, 2006) and Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (Scarecrow, 1991). Her most recent volume is collection of essays, co-edited with Karen L. Carter, entitled Foreign Artists and Communities in Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise (Routledge, 2015).

Allison Deutsch is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London.