The Invention of the Model

Although mastery of the representation of the human figure was central to art making as early as the fifteenth century in Europe, in the nineteenth-century French imagination the artist's model became identified as a distinct social type and cultural trope. This study of the artist's model in Paris between 1830 and 1870 incorporates three histories: a social history of professional models, a cultural history of models as social types, and an art history of representations of the model in elite and popular visual culture.