![]() ![]() One commonality McCabe sees between muses of the past is how often the woman would start out with a thriving, or at least promising, artistic career of her own, which would eventually become sidelined as the man’s fame grew. The show featured twelve of Siddal’s works and examined her career, style and the prejudice she faced as both a female artist and a muse. Even today, there have only been two solo exhibitions of Siddal’s work: one in 1991 at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield and a second in 2018, titled Beyond Ophelia, at Wightwick Manor. She was an artist and poet in her own right, but has more often been described as the “tragic muse”, and it’s meant her life has become intertwined with the Pre Raphaelites’ artistic portrayals of her. McCabe cites Elizabeth Siddal as a classic example of this. And for the women who posed for them, it served as a way to ingratiate themselves further into the art world at a time when they were unable to access formal training at places like The Royal Academy of Arts, which didn’t admit women until 1860.” Elizabeth Siddal, Lovers Listening to Music, 1854 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford “The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood really leaned into the romanticization of the model-they shaped their work around it. There’s just so much ‘looking’ going on,” she explains. “When someone is sitting for an artist for long periods of time, it can become an intense artistic collaboration. The image of a young, beautiful waif as a source of creative revelation to a brooding, often older, artist has been perpetuated in countless films and TV programmes, and McCabe thinks this is because of our conflation of “model” with “muse”. ![]() ![]() It’s in the art world especially that tales of artists and muses have been able to flourish and become romanticized over the centuries. Elizabeth Siddal, Pippa Passes, 1854 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Looking at the artistic partnerships of writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists, and celebrating the women who were a part of them, McCabe hopes to help us understand what being a muse actually involved. McCabe’s book, in part, aims to unpack the complex relationships between female muses and their more successful male counterparts, and also explore how the upheld notion of a muse has left many women overshadowed, anonymous or underestimated in their work. “A muse supposedly provides a source of inspiration for an artist, but that ‘source’ can come in so many different forms, whether that’s posing as an artist’s model or just offering advice and support through the creative process.” “The idea of ‘invoking the muse’ suggests a spirit, not a person,” she says. This ethereal quality to the term adds a weight and sense of grandiosity, something that Katie McCabe, author of the recently published More Than a Muse: Creative Partnerships That Sold Talented Women Short, believes can warp our idea of what a muse can be. The word itself dates back to Greek mythology, with Zeus’ daughters forming the nine Muses who presided over the arts and science. Courtesy PAAM, gift of Laurence C and J Anton Schiffenhaus in memory of Mary Schiffenhaus, and two anonymous donors, 2016Ī muse, in the most basic sense, is a person who serves as an inspiration to an artist. ![]() Josephine Verstille (Nivison) Hopper, Untitled (Self-portrait). ![]()
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