Victorian Art in Britain

ILord Leighton's Favourite Model and Muse, Dorothy Dene was born Ada Alice Pullen, the eldest of five sisters, one of whom seems to have died in childhood. Her father, Abraham, deserted the family, and the mother Sarah died in 1881. Dorothy had to support her sisters, and worked, not very successfully as an actress, and as an artist's model.

This was the kind of situation which in the 19th century forced many unfortunate young women into part-time prostitution. Incidentally prostitution in London was far more prevelant than it is today. I have been somewhat irritated when reading books about nineteenth century art, particularly by American women academics, by their tendency to censor working class women of the time for working as prostitutes. It was not a choice, unhappily it was often a necessity. Rossetti's model Fanny Cornforth was such a woman. Ada Pullen, indifferent actress that she may have been did not do this.

I have not been able to ascertain just when Ada Pullen met Leighton, but she became his favourite model in the early 1880s. Her sisters Hetty, Edith, and Lena also sat to Leighton. George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950 knew Leighton and Dorothy Dene, as I shall henceforth call her, well and it has been suggested that he used their relationship as the basis for Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolitlle in Pygmalion.

Leighton was captivated by Dorothy; he tried to further her career as an actress, and to educate her. Modern observers often speculate that the relationship was sexual, but I think that this is unlikely.

Dorothy was the model for a number of Leighton's late, and most celebrated paintings, including 'Flaming June,' and 'The Bath of Psyche.' In the last day of his life Leighton set up the Dene Trust, to which he left a substantial sum of money, for the benefit of Dorothy and her sisters. Sadly she did not long survive him, dying in 1899 at the age of forty.