The secret world of the artist’s mannequin

A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft leather skin and flexible, jointed limbs. The top-of-the-range article — described in Roberson’s catalogue as ‘Parisian stuffed’ — was pricey. Nonetheless, painters often felt they just had to have one whatever the cost.

Many such creatures inhabit Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish, a pioneering exhibition at the Fitz-william Museum, Cambridge. There are also distinguished paintings on view. But it is the figures themselves — slightly comic, a touch eerie, hard to classify — that are the real stars of the show.

The curator, Jane Munro, has highlighted a crowd of objects that have been hiding in plain view for hundreds of years. We have always known that artists used lay figures or mannequins to help them with tasks such as drawing drapery. In one such study, by the early 16th-century Florentine, Fra Bartolomeo, a wooden doll can vaguely be made out beneath carefully observed folds of cloth.

It has not, however, previously been pointed out how ubiquitous these patient artistic helpmates were in the studios of the past. This was partly because they were a shameful secret. Poussin, for example, was known to use wax figures — miniature ones — in a kind of toy theatre as a method of working out his compositions and their lighting. A reconstruction of this contraption stands next to the Fitzwilliam’s magnificent Poussin, ‘Extreme Unction’ (1638-40), on the route through the museum towards the exhibition.

Poussin’s reliance on little models, however, came to be regarded as a bad habit. Delacroix blamed it for what he considered the ‘extreme aridity’ of Poussin’s work. Theoretically at least, art was considered far too elevated an affair, intellectually and spiritually, for its practitioners to stoop to employing such gadgets.