Then he found another source: an illustrated journal article about Pearce and his time in Paris, where, “lo and behold, one of the illustrations was a pen-and-ink drawing of that little head study. And it said Père Bainville, right in the caption. I was like, okay, well, done deal.”
Voila! The model’s name was Père Bainville, but discovering this was not the end of Hurtado’s investigation. After informing the Drawings Department about his discovery, Hurtado continued his research into Père Bainville and his life in Paris. He now had his name, but it wasn’t much to go on.
In search of a peculiar model
“Père” is not a first name but the French word for “father,” often used as an honorific designation or professional title. Shirley-Fox mentions that Père Bainville was a military veteran, but it was by looking at the years he was active as a model that we hoped to uncover more clues about his identity.
In late 19th-century Paris, at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and the smaller art academies located across the city, life drawing classes were an essential part of the curriculum. Models were an important part of that process, and the work was involved.
Artists would work with their models for about a week and the length of each session depended on whether classes met during the day or in the evening. During the day, sessions would last about five hours and models would have to remain still for about an hour with a 15-minute rest period. For evening sessions, which were reserved for a select group of students, models would pose for roughly two hours per session. This is different from today, where models will generally pose for much shorter stretches of time and are given more frequent breaks.
Selecting a model was a weekly ritual, and artists were looking for a particular type of model. During this time, there was an increasing emphasis on capturing the individual physical qualities of sitters with distinct physiques. Models were selected through a sometimes uncomfortable fashion.
According to Hurtado, “Models would gather outside of the gates of the École, at least in some cases, and they would come and basically audition. They would get up on the stand and strike a pose, and the students would vote yea or nay. There are accounts of models going up and the students saying things like, ‘Oh, she is short of leg.’ Just the most awful sort of American Idol kind of audition that you can imagine! And there were models that were career models. Some of them were so prized for either physiques or the attitudes they would adopt for playing certain characters.”
Père Bainville’s beard, hairstyle, and physique would have made him popular with art students, explains Hurtado. And he likely spent an extended period with them, which is the subject of a funny story in the French periodical, Journal des Artistes published in 1892, belonging to a poor, anonymous American artist. The artist hired a model to pose in his studio, but the sitter complained that the space was too cold. Rather than heat the room, the artist, as put by Hurtado, “painted a trompe l’oeil thermostat that permanently read 16 degrees [Celsius] on the wall. He was basically gaslighting this model! Anytime he asked about the temperature, the artist was like, ‘It’s plenty warm.’”
That model’s name, according to the journal, was Père Bainville. Centuries later, he’s now recorded for posterity. However, the names and lives of many models remain unknown, and their existence is captured only in the works they helped to create. Knowing a little bit more about the man in Getty’s drawings enriches how the works are seen and interpreted. This new knowledge certainly affects how Hurtado views Seurat and Pichot’s drawings.
“I think that very often—today and in the past—models don’t always get their due, particularly for artists who are interested in work that is representational to any degree. Without models there, you have nothing. You can’t make anything,” he says.
“Very often the art-making process is seen as something that’s intensely personal, and there’s a huge lopsided interest in the artist. But at least, in this little corner of the art world, in this particular mode of creation, it is you as a person responding to the world around you, or a specific person in front of you. And there is this recognition that this is not still life that you’re drawing. This is an actual person. And so it is, to varying degrees, a collaborative enterprise.”
