The Black Muse

relationship with them was. I wonder if they were real or imagined, or if the character is a composite person. I wonder how black people lived in whatever setting they were in.

the black person and the painting. Fortunately, plenty of folks who do this kind of research for a living wanted to go down that exact rabbit hole. So today we're going on a little journey through these art models' lives just to get to know a little more about a few of the women who have gone unnamed on wall text and overlooked in art scholarship. I'm Katie and I'm Eves, and today we're training our eye on the Black muse. The black woman that you described in that painting Olympia

is named Lore. She's tending to Olympia. In the painting, Olympia is a sex worker. That's why she's nude on the bed. Why she got shoes on the bed that I don't know, no manner I mean also may have something to do with class, like showing, oh, I can you know? This is what I do in my bed. I keep my shoes on. I always got to be prepared,

So I'm not sure about that. But lour is Olympia's servant, and in the book Posing Modernity, the curator doctor Denise Morrell points out how scholars really didn't talk about what Laura's presence in the painting means. But Laura also shows up in Maynee's eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty two painting Children in the Tuilerie Gardens, and Laura is also the subject of a portrait Maynee painted the same year that he created Olympia. Katie here is Children in the

Tuilerie Gardens and the portrait of Lore. Do you notice any differences between the two?

the portrait she's right in the center. Her gaze is off center, but she is the focus of the portrait. So it's almost like from Children to the portrait, Lore came to life. Manee wrote in his notebook that Laura was a very beautiful black woman, but of course Lore was more than just her appearance. Slavery was abolished in

French territories in eighteen forty eight. Now, look, that wasn't the first time that slavery was abolished in the French territories, and later on you'll hear me talk about it being abolished at different times. But don't be confused. This is one time that slavery was abolished in French territories and because of that, the lore that's in these paintings was a free black woman. She lived at eleven Rue Vontemiel

in Paris, not too far from Manet studio. There was a small but growing community of free black folks in her part of the city, which was on the north side. And it's great that we know her name and where she lived, but there isn't a lot of information about her life outside of those details. But we do know a little bit more about Fanny Eaton. More on this muse after the break.

looks like in this painting. So Fanny, though, was born in Jamaica in eighteen thirty five, and her mother was probably born in a slavery and her doubts probably a white man, but there are a lot of questions around her actual ancestry. But either way, Fanny and her mother probably made their way to England in the eighteen forties and by the time Fanny was sixteen, she was working as a servant in London. She married a coach driver named James Eaton, and the two of them had ten

children together over the course of twenty years. Ten kids.

had to come from somewhere. I don't know how much James Eaton was getting, but I would imagine for ten kids, you know, she had them over time, so I'm sure that the money that she got from her work as a model was a great help to her family. So the British artist Simeon Solomon was the first known artist to draw studies of Fanny. Her first appearance as an art model in public was in Simeon Solomon's painting The Mother of Moses. In that painting debut in eighteen sixty

at a Royal Academy exhibition. But the whole thing about Fanny and her being amused was that she had light skin in this racial ambiguity, and that made her like a good muse in the pre laphylite artist's eyes, because that meant that she could portray a bunch of different figures from the Bible, and that was a rare role for black women in Victorian art. In that kind of art, they weren't usually models that fit into white standards of beauty.

They were, you know, othered, and they were there for decor ration, often for contrasts and for a scene setting. In July of eighteen sixty, Fanny was paid fifteen shillings each for three sittings that she did at the Royal Academy, so you get an idea of how much she was paid for her work. But she stopped modeling sometime in the eighteen seventies, and nobody knows why, but one of her daughters may have fallen in her footsteps and become

an art model. And at some point Fanny's husband died and Fanny started working as a seamstress and moved to the Isle of White to do domestic work for a family. So as you can see, there are a lot of gaps in her story, as there are for a lot of black and mixed race women in the past. But there is a little bit we know about her in any amount, any measure that we can uncover. I think it's worthwhile talking about.

And then after you tell me what you see, we'll talk about if you feel any differently.

she was okay. But there were people, even the artists who painted her, who kind of didn't really understand what her racial mixture was either, because there was one of the artists, Rosetti, who said to someone else that, oh, she's not a Hindu, she's a Mulato. And in other episodes of this podcast, we've kind of talked about how black people did past and when the orientalism was jumping out.

Black people would pass for what they would call Hindus, or they would say that they were Indian and things like that. But we don't have any document of what Fanny Eaton herself said or how she thought about her race. There's a lot of information that's missing, and I don't want to speculate around it, but there is no evidence that I saw that she denied her race or anything like that. So people would just say things about her

appearance and that how they liked it. Like somebody says she had a very fine head and figure, which sounds very objectifying, But I mean, I guess that's what you're doing there, the object of your painting. Yeah, but I do think that takes on another level when you're talking about black people and that's what you're gazing at.

black woman. Ben Wah never took note of her model's name. Katie, tell me what you see in this portrait?

Plus the French Revolution had just ended in seventeen ninety nine, so this painting could have been a nod to liberty. You were talking about it too, if you were looking at it from an American perspective, because you know, we still know around the time period this was slavery may come up in our mind. She's not fully clothed, so there is the idea of like moving on from liberty or thinking about what ways you're confined in your life if you're thinking about slavery. So even you, you know,

from an American perspective, in twenty twenty four. It made that link between the two, and that is a perspective that some people took on the meaning of this painting. But in eighteen oh two, a Napoleon Bonaparte said, just kidding, run that back, and he reinstated at slavery. So this could also be perceived to be about slavery's return, because this painting, to remind you was done in eighteen hundred,

so it was just two years later when slavery returned. So, like you said, her breast is uncovered, and in eighteen hundred this was considered pretty inappropriate. But Benoi I could have done that as an allusion to how black folks were inspected at slave markets. But either way, some critics at the time were offended by her nudity. Some didn't like how her skim, they didn't like that the image had hints of eroticism. But folks weren't really worried about

who she was back in eighteen hundred. They were just worried about the fact that she was black and how that affected the art. One critic name Jean Baptiste Bouttard said, whom can one trust in life after such horror? It is a white and pretty hand which has created this blackness. So he's talking about how offended he is by this painting.

There's like this contrast between the subject of purity and liberty and the delicate nature of her draped clothing, and that didn't go with the ways that white folks viewed black skin as horrifying and ugly. So in this case, her skin's pretty dark, so unlike Fanny Eaton, who was light skinned, there is not really any ambiguity around what her background is. So people were clearly jumping in on

that and the criticism that they had. They really couldn't take the skin, the fact that her skin was dark. They thought it was an affront to the whole artistic medium, to the esthetic, to the industry, because this white woman was painting this dark skin, especially within this context, and it hazard to say somebody of her skin tone wouldn't be considered a person who could go between different biblical

figures and create that ambiguity like Fanny Eaton would. So if you had to guess, Katie, what do you think this woman in the painting's name is?

story that we do know about Madeline. This painting of her is in the Louverus collection and on the museum site, the painting is actually titled Portrait June femme noir, not Negress. It seems like negress and it was still kind of a diminutive, derogatory term even in the French language. When you go back and read old sources, even American ones, and they're talking about black women, they often use the

term negress. In an American English context, I feel like it can kind of sound a little bit more uppny, so, but yeah, I think it is interesting though, to see the people that we talked about today are just a few of all of the muses, and there are so many who weren't named. And of course there were muses, there were a lot of them who were women, but there were also people who were sitters for a lot

of portraits who were black men. And these kinds of people have been the objects of artists I over the years. It's interesting because you know, the word muse kind of has this connotation of uplifting and there's someone who I admire, there's someone who I have a lot of affection for potentially, or that I have stuff to learn from it. It's really, I feel like a glowing word. And these models were

the inspiration for the artists. But at the same time, there was still a hierarchy, like there was still a difference of authority between the artists and the sitter. They are still the ones that are working for money. And we talked about how Fanny Eaton looks pretty upstanding and classy in her picture. She has on the per earrings and she has on the iridescent shawl, and then also madeleine. She is kind of draped in clothing that wouldn't necessarily

be working class. But these women were working class, like ten children making fifteen shillings for three each for three sittings. They had husbands, they had to go back home at the end of the day. They changed their professions in some cases because for what reasons we don't know, but they were still inferior to the artists who were creating the work and obviously to a lot of people who

were viewing the work. And I've seen some sources that talk about Madeleines placed in the halls, all next to all the other images, maybe on whatever floor it was on in the Louvra and Madelines the only one with dark skin, and definitely Scan that's that dark, So there is this dark contrast. She immediately stands out. It's easy to other.

But it's interesting to see like how things are different, and just like what it means to be a model, and like what story you're telling through sitting there about yourself, Like one is I'm working class and I need these shillings, and the others I'm so beautiful and everyone should aspire to look like me.

of their course work. So it was a kind of a mundane job as opposed to something that was more uplifted because you had these people who were supposed to be turning into great artists and you were just a person who's coming in to be the vessel kind of for this amazing and enlightening work that they were going

to do. So yeah, back then, definitely different. One parallel though, or kind of similarity that I see specifically with Fanny Eaton story, is thinking about her ambiguity and how much in media today, like in commercials, a lot of the time, people will tend to have someone they'll fill their color

quota by bringing someone in who's ambiguous. It seems like a lot of companies like to do that because these people can fill whatever role they need, but they can also not hear any backlash because they're like, oh, I got this poc in. Yeah, So that wasn't necessarily their aim back then, but in a way, yeah, they didn't care about that. It just fulfilled their goals of being preaphytes and painting in the way that they did.