Couldn’t sleep and so I did nothing but catch up with tasks I was supposed to finish a while ago, and did some sketching while I was at it.
During a break (well, one of many breaks), I researched museums to see which would appeal to the mites most and stumbled across this information page about Millais’s painting, The Black Brunswicker. There is a bit in the info page that caught my attention:
Millais spent three months painting ‘The Black Brunswicker’. [...] Millais used Charles Dickens’s daughter Kate as the model for the girl and a private in the Life Guards for the soldier. Each had to model separately using a lay figure to lean against.
Imagine if the private were the hero and the author’s daughter the heroine for a romance novel. =D
Yeah, okay, their actual modelling partners were merely lay figures, but hey, they can model together in fiction, can’t they? It seems simple maths to me: two people x three months = potential true lurve! The artist would be a problem, true. One could create a love triangle out of it, I suppose.
I think I’m attracted to the fact they weren’t titled. I’m rather tired of titled or wealthy-as-hell characters and those trivial or shallow seemingly important issues they deal with.
I’ve always been a fan of romance novels (and films) that feature ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Such as The Mummy – Rick is a brash, quick-witted American soldier and Miss Evelyn is a scholar who aspires to be a librarian. (OK, she has a massive estate, but I don’t let that get in the way of enjoying the film.)
In this case of the soldier and the daughter, the “extraordinary” aspect would be the difference between their social statuses. He would have to be really ambitious and fucking brave to be that close to her. There would be a chance their romance would have them disowned, penniless and sent to coventry from the society possibly for good, which would happen if her parents weren’t Bohemian and didn’t like him.
I was curious enough to investigate the fate of Dickens’s daughter Kate. Or rather, whom did she marry? And found this excerpt from the Family and Friends page at http://charlesdickenspage.com:
Kate Macready (Katie) Dickens (1839-1929) Dickens’ third child, named for Dickens’ friend actor William Macready. She had a talent for art and attended Bedford college. She sided with her mother in the separation of her parents and married artist Charles Collins, brother of Dickens friend Wilkie Collins. Dickens felt she married to get out of the home after the separation. When Collins, sickly for years, died she married artist Carlo Perugini. She later revealed her father’s relationship with Ellen Ternan in Gladys Storey’s book Dickens and Daughter.
You know what this tells you? She was twenty-one when she modelled for The Black Brunswicker, and her parents – Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine – were formally separated when she was nineteen. And although she sided with her mother over the separation, she was living with her father at the time of the painting, but she married Charles Collins that year in 1860, according to this page - Willie Collins and Charles Dickens – at the Victorian Web:
On the morning of 17 July 1860, Katie Dickens married Charles Collins at St. Mary’s Church in Higham, near Gad’s Hill. Katie was just 20, high-spirited; the groom, 32, was an introspective, gloomy minor painter and travel-writer. From the first it was apparent that Charles Collins’s health was poor and that Katie was destined for widowhood: he died of cancer of the stomach in 1873.
In short, she was independent with a mind of her own. Heh. If she did fall for the soldier, she would have gone for him, anyway. Bugger.
But I still stand by the idea that there’s a romance novel waiting to be written. What if the soldier couldn’t be with her at the time of the painting, so she married the artist who eventually died, which could mean the soldier – now in a better position – can marry her? Whoo hoo! =D
(cough) All right, that’s my nose back to the grinding wheel. Cheers.
I so hear you on the “not titled” thing – it’s actually a big reason why I like American-set historicals and westerns so much. I refuse believe that the privilege held the market share on falling in love. I like to imagine that butlers and scullery maids could find love too
And I’m trying to recall romances I’ve read that featured characters modeling for artists. The only one that comes to mind is Beyond Seduction by Emma Holly. The hero is the artist and the heroine is modeling for him.
Yeah, it’s also the reason why I like Australian- and American-set historicals. And you’re right – butlers and scullery maids could find love, too. I’m rather sad that historical authors still ignore non-titled people in most settings including Britain.
It pissed me off sometimes, but hey, you know what they say, the market rules the reading world. :/ I was hoping that ebook publishing would widen the boundaries, but by the look of it, it still focuses on titled characters. Why? Damn it, whyyyy? Oh, sorry. Was I whining? Yeah, I was. Bad Maili. =]
Holly’s Beyond Seduction? Ooh, I think I still have that in my too-many-years-old TBR pile in one of boxes somewhere. Thank you for the heads up. =D As always, you’re awesome.