Searching for Muriel Foster
The model for Lamia by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)
James K Baker
JW Waterhouse (1849–1917) painted six versions of the Greek mythological figure of Lamia derived from Keats’s poem of the same name, about a creature half-serpent, half-beautiful young woman who draws men to their death. The principal finished version is that of 1905 where the temptress is seen draped in a flimsy robe accompanied by the sloughed-off remnants of snakeskin (Pl 1, Pl 1a). It was praised by Anthony F Hobson as being ‘one of the most beautiful and admirable of Waterhouse’s fantasies’ [1]
1 Lamia and the Soldier by JW Waterhouse, 1905. Oil on canvas, 144.7 x 90.2 cm (56.9 x 35.5 in). Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, gift of Moss Davis, 1930
1a Detail of head of Lamia in Pl 1
The name of the model for the painting became known when Charles Ede, founder of Folio Fine Art, London, listed it in his catalogue (XLII) of December 1966 as ‘WATERHOUSE, John William R.A. Study of Miss Muriel Foster, Pencil, a delicate study of the profile and hair line of this young girl’ (Pl 2).
2 Sketch of head of Muriel Foster, with pencil inscription, by Waterhouse, 1905. 4.5 x 5.7 in. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven CT
3 Detail of pencil inscription in Pl 2
The pencil inscription on the drawing (Pl 3) was not illustrated in this catalogue and so Foster’s full name (ie including her first name), and Chingford home address were not known to Hobson, who knew only her middle name, Muriel, and so she was identified simply as Miss Muriel Foster.[2] In 1981, Christopher Wood remained unaware that Ede and Hobson had named her and wrote: ‘One cannot help speculating about the identity of the mysterious and beautiful young model reappearing so often in Waterhouse’s paintings. It remains one of the few Pre-Raphaelite mysteries that will probably never be solved.’ None the less, like Hobson, Wood believed the same model had posed for more of Waterhouse’s femme fatale paintings.[3]
Again, in 1996, Andrew Bolton Marvick asked: ‘Who is the young model seducing the knight?’ He added that Waterhouse’s ‘desire for such a girl was to model for other of his sensual paintings, and while changes in her hair color and features vary, the unknown model’s general appearance is recognizable’. Like other authors, Marvick believed the same model appeared in other works by the artist that carried ‘romantic and sexual overtones’.[4] In 2008, Peter Trippi wrote, with perhaps exaggerated caution: ‘The search for her name has pivoted on a drawing for his (Waterhouse’s)1905 Lamia on which is inscribed “Miss Muriel Foster/Buxton Rd/Chingford” but this annotation is problematic and the search remains open.’[5] In 2021, however, the present author revealed the model’s full name as Sybil Muriel Foster.[6]
In 1998, James K and Cathy L Baker had interviewed Dr Hobson to learn more of what he knew about Muriel Foster. It transpired that in 1975 he had interviewed a niece of the artist’s wife (Esther Waterhouse), a Mrs Doris May Somerville, who didn’t know Muriel Foster personally but had learned from her Aunt Esther that the model had married in London in 1908 and subsequently gone to live in Hove. Hobson went to Hove to search for her but much to his disappointment learned that she had died there only the year before.
Hobson wrote of Muriel Foster in his 1980 monograph that there are ‘subtleties of her representation which may at times have fused one model’s face with another, but his two favourite models appear as themselves in Waterhouse’s 1900 Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus. The darker girl on the left is unknown by name. The model on the right (Muriel Foster) was newly discovered for Waterhouse’s 1893 La Belle Dame sans Merci and is enshrined in his 1901 A Mermaid.’ He added: ‘She and her companion are there in his 1896 Hylas and the Nymphs’ (Pl 4).
4 Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896. Oil on canvas, 98.2 x 163.3 cm (38.7 x 64.3 in). Manchester City Art Gallery
In this latter painting, Hobson believed that Muriel Foster is the nymph pulling down on the arm of Hylas while her unnamed companion is the one who offers him a handful of pearls. Both nymphs wish to lure him down into the water. In the same book Hobson stated that Muriel Foster modelled for the eponymous Pandora who opens the golden box in Waterhouse’s 1896 painting of the subject, and also for the water nymph in his 1903 Echo and Narcissus. As Lamia in 1905 – it is clearly she, as the profile in the painting (Pl 1a) and sketch (Pl 2) match – she offers herself to a knight in armour, intending ‘by her mesmerizing gaze and the offer of her alluring red lips to pull him down to her for an invited kiss, [only to] suddenly metamorphose into a frightful boa-like constrictor to devour him’.
Hobson also identified Muriel Foster as being the model for Apollo and Daphne of 1908; for Penelope and the Suitors, 1912; for A Tale from The Decameron, 1916; and for The Enchanted Garden of the same year (Pl 8) where Hobson believed that Waterhouse had depicted her as the woman dressed in red. Accordingly, writers on Waterhouse and his art, who followed Hobson, believed that Muriel Foster had been a favourite model for 23 years, between 1893, when he thought she had first been discovered as a model, and 1916. In any event, a note of caution perhaps needs to be struck in that identifying a particular model in a specific work does remain a matter of guesswork at least in part, and because, as Hobson noted in 1989, Waterhouse had a ‘self-taught ability to retain an image in his memory of a model’s original appearance that would enable him to carry a picture of her through to completion (known as personification) with very little variation of how she once looked’.
In order to know more about Muriel Foster as a longtime Waterhouse model, online research was carried out by the present author and Cathy L Baker in 2004, through London’s General Records Service, England, for records of a person named Muriel Foster who once lived on Buxton Road in Chingford. From the 1901 population census with people’s names and addresses given, the name found was ‘S. Muriel Foster’ – along with others in her family living there – which is proof that she was known in life only by her middle name. And it now possible to state clearly here, for the first time, that the Miss Muriel Foster named on the 1905 head sketch is indeed identical with the Miss Sybil Muriel Foster who did once live on Buxton Road in Chingford. Furthermore, from the 1901 population census of Chingford it was learned that ‘S. Muriel Foster’, then aged seventeen, once lived in house number thirteen (Pl 5). Others present at the time of the census were: F. (Frances) L. (Louise) Foster, head of the household; H.C. (Helen Corisande) Foster, daughter aged twenty; and Helen Litcombe, servant, aged fifty-two. That Frances Louise Foster was named head of the household indicates that she was a widow, while the fact that the servant’s name was also listed there indicates that she lived in the house.
5 No. 13 Buxton Road, Chingford, London. The house was built in the 1890s and reveals that the Foster family was reasonably well off
Further online research in 2004 on the Foster family eventually located a granddaughter of Sybil Muriel Foster, a Mrs Pauline Softley, who lived in Hove. In correspondence with her, Mrs Softley stated that she didn’t know that her grandmother had been a model but believed it to be true once she had seen a copy of the profile sketch (Pl 2 here) which we sent to her, since it also bore her grandmother’s name and Chingford address on it. In return, Mrs Softley kindly sent us a 1908 photograph of Sybil Muriel Foster (Pl 6) which shows her to have been a beautiful young woman, supporting Hobson’s belief that, over the years, ‘Waterhouse continually sought in his models his ideal vision of womanhood.’
6 Sybil Muriel Foster, 1908. Photograph by Martin Jacobette, Kingston, Surrey, 6 x 4 in. It is dated the year of her marriage. Private collection of James K Baker
Along with the picture and the biographical information sent with it, it is now known that Sybil Muriel Foster was born on 14 March 1884 in Chelsham, twenty-five miles to the south-east of London. Her father was William Foster and her mother Frances Louise (Moore) Foster. In 1908, Sybil Muriel Foster married Alfred Henry Young and moved to Hove, where she lived until her death on 11 February 1974, at the age of eighty-nine. Sybil Muriel (Foster) Young had two daughters Beryl and Pamela. Beryl had a daughter, Pauline – the Mrs Softley who sent us the 1908 photograph. Pauline Softley died in Hove in 2018.
One very significant fact that emerged from our research is that, since Sybil Muriel Foster was born in 1884, she can only have been nine years old in 1893 when Waterhouse painted La Belle Dame sans Merci. Hobson believed that Foster was the model for this picture and had been ‘newly discovered’, which cannot have been the case. Similarly, Foster was only 11 years old when Waterhouse painted A Mermaid in 1901, and so Hobson was also mistaken in believing that she posed for that painting. Until other information is found to the contrary, it seems clear that Sybil Muriel Foster sat only for Waterhouse’s 1905 Lamia although, in so doing, she made history, as the only model named on a Waterhouse work and – now –the only Waterhouse model known from a photograph.
Hobson studied Waterhouse’s many paintings for his doctoral thesis – those in various museums, galleries, private collections and those for sale by art dealers – as well as the collection of Waterhouse’s drawings in the V&A Museum, and he came to believe that Waterhouse had used the same model for many of them. To him, the images looked too much alike to not have been of the same model, and many art historians have followed Hobson in this belief.
In 1998, Baker and Baker interviewed Dr Hobson and his wife, June, to learn more. The interview was held in their 300-year-old Pear Tree Cottage in Ilmington, Warwickshire. The walls in Hobsons’s outdoor studio were decorated with art of his own creation of which some, seemingly, was in the style of Waterhouse’s works. A large unfinished oil of his that was sitting on an easel was a scene with King Henry VIII in it. That day, June Hobson did much of the talking on behalf of her husband, who was ill at the time and finding it hard to talk. She told of their 1968 visit to the Royal Academy of Arts in London where they saw Waterhouse’s 1901 A Mermaid. June said that while Anthony stood close studying the artwork in the painting, she took a snapshot of him standing next to it which showed his image reflected in the glass and she said, ‘Tony was so enamoured with the picture that it sat on his desk for ten years while he wrote his research.’ And indeed the mermaid painting graces the dust jackets of his 1980s monographs.
June Hobson further told of their search for the Mermaid model, believed by them to be Muriel Foster. As mentioned above, after learning from a niece of Esther Waterhouse in 1975 that Foster had married in 1908 in London and then moved to Hove, they went to Hove in the hope of finding her, only to learn that she had died.
Hobson did, however, write in 1980 that, after Waterhouse died in 1917, his unsold works of oils, sketches and studies that had been in the possession of his wife Esther were sold on 23 July 1926 at Christie’s, London. Two almost identical versions of the 1905 Lamia, named ‘Lamia – Keats’ in tribute to the poet, were sold. One went for 100 guineas, but the other for only six guineas, which suggests that it was an oil study (Hobson discusses how Waterhouse often painted oil sketches through to or near to completion which were unsigned and undated and not intended to leave the studio). At this auction a collection of 21 head sketches was sold to ‘Jas [James] Nicoll’ for £6, although the only sketch among them that bore a model’s name was that of Muriel Foster (Lot 8) (Pl 2 here).
7 Hand-written ‘stamp’ recording acquisition of the drawing in Pl 2 by James Nicoll and its provenance on the occasion of its sale at Christie’s in 1926
In addition to the inscription this drawing also bears a curious hand-written ‘stamp’ by Nicoll with details of its provenance (Pl 7 and see Pl 2). The Nicoll in question was evidently Dr James Nicoll (1872–1958) who donated his large collection of chiefly Victorian paintings and drawings to his first alma mater, the University of Dundee in 1951, a collector described by Matthew Jarron, Curator of Collections at the university as ‘obsessive about recording the provenance of his pictures’.[7]
The subsequent whereabouts of this sketch remained unknown for 40 years until it was sold by Folio Fine Art in 1966. But a little can be added to this story. When Dr Nicoll decided to donate his collection to the University of Dundee, which he did in 1951, it did not meet with the approval of his wife (according to Matthew Jarron). So large was the collection, however, that it could not all be housed by the university which, in 1958, gave back a substantial part of it to Mrs Nicoll. She subsequently sold it at Christie’s (at a date presently unknown). Since the profile sketch for Lamia (Pl 2) is not in the university collection – although no fewer than 85 Nicoll pictures still are – it may be presumed that it was one of the works returned to Mrs Nicoll, and put up for auction. One way or another it then passed to Charles Ede for sale in 1966.
The drawing resurfaced again, 20 years later, when, in 1986, it was bequeathed to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, from the Elizabeth S Tower collection in San Francisco, California, among 33 American and English works. It can be assumed that Elizabeth Tower had been the buyer of the sketch in the 1966 auction but for what amount is unknown.
8 The Enchanted Garden by JW Waterhouse, 1916. Oil on canvas, 112 x 161 cm (44 x 63.5 in.). Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight
Muriel Foster was 21 when she posed for Waterhouse’s 1905 Lamia and she was 32 when Waterhouse painted The Enchanted Garden in 1916 (Pl 8), for which Hobson believed she modelled for the woman in red at the left. Foster had, of course, by now been living in Hove for many years and so, if she is indeed to be identified as the woman in red, then this would support Hobson’s belief that Muriel Foster had been for a long time a favourite Waterhouse model: not however, because on this occasion she would have modelled from the life but because her image had remained imprinted on the artist’s memory – and, of course, because he still had the pencil sketch (indeed, more than one sketch) of her in his studio to remind him.
The Enchanted Garden is derived from a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron where a married woman, Dionora, sets her would-be young lover, Ansaldo, what she hopes is an impossible task if he wishes to win her: to create a summer garden in the middle of January. Thanks to a magician (seen at the left), Ansaldo achieves this: a flurry of snow indicating the wintry weather can be seen behind Dionora, the woman in red, who looks understandably disconcerted at what is suddenly in front of her.
The point is, of course, that Waterhouse was not only working on this painting in the winter of 1915–16: he was doing so in the knowledge that he had terminal cancer and heart disease, which indeed claimed him on 10 February 2016, with the canvas still unfinished on his easel. Dionora, in the shape, apparently, of Muriel Foster, stands at the foot of what appears to be a grave immediately at her feet – no doubt suggestive of that of Waterhouse – with white lilies at its foot and red poppies at its head. Red poppies represent consolation, remembrance and death, and white lilies peace and the restored innocence of the soul after death. ‘Surely,’ Hobson wrote, the garden is the haven that Waterhouse desired for himself.’
Apendix
Outline of the life of Sybil Muriel Young (née Foster) (1884–1974)
Birth 14 March 1884, Chelsham, Surrey, England
Baptism, 29 June 1884, St Leonard’s, Chelsham, Surrey, England
Age 7 Residence, Chelsham, Surrey, England
Age 9 Death of father, William Foster (1828–1893), Chelsham, Surrey, England
Age 17 Residence, 13 Buxton Road, Chingford, Essex, England
Age 24 Marriage, 5 April 1908, St Paul’s, Chingford, to Alfred Henry Young (1882–1952)
Age 27 Residence, 2 April 1911, 128 Palewell Park, East Sheen, Mortlake, Surrey, England
Age 27 Birth of daughter, Beryl Marion Young (1911–1990), 8 June 1911, Richmond, Surrey, England
Age 37 Death of mother, Frances Louise (Moore) Foster (1841–1921) 28 December 1921, Powis Square, Brighton, Sussex, England
Age 41 Birth of daughter, Pamela M Young (1925–), September 1925, Steyning, Hampshire, England
Age 44 Death of sister, Florence Frances Foster (1862–1929), 15 February, Croydon, Surrey, England
Age 55 Residence, 1939 Sussex, England; marital status, married
Age 64 Death of sister, Helen Corisande Foster (1871–1948), 3 April 1948, 4 Selbourne Place, Hove, Sussex, England
Age 68 Death of husband, Alfred Henry Young, 5 November 1952, 4 Selbourne Place Hove, Sussex, England
Age 84 Death of brother, Clement Colin Foster (1879–1968), Manna Mead, 10 Shirley Road, Hove, Sussex, England
Age 89 Death of Sybil Muriel (Foster) Young, 11 February 1974, Hove, Sussex, England
Probate 10 May 1974, Brighton, Sussex, England
- Acknowledgements. Special thanks for information about Sybil Muriel Young (née Foster) must first go to Pauline Softley who supplied a photo and biographical data about her grandmother. In 2021, Mark Hills, great-grandson of Sybil Muriel Foster, provided further information about her. Dr Anthony F Hobson and his wife, June, told of their futile search for her. Dr Andrew Bolton Marvick contributed information based on his own research on Waterhouse models for his PhD dissertation. Phillip Basner at the Yale Center for British Art provided information about the provenance of the Lamia head sketch from the Elizabeth S Tower collection, including details of its exhibition in 1991 at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina. Charles Ede, Jeremy Rex Parkes and Serenna Cooper of Charles Ede Ltd, London, contributed information about the 1966 auction sale of the Lamia sketch. Last, but not least, appreciation goes to Cathy L Baker who helped search the Internet for information about Sybil Muriel (Foster) Young.James K Baker and Cathy L Baker: ‘Miss Muriel Foster, the John William Waterhouse Model’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 8 (Fall 1999) pp70–81; ‘The lamia in the art of JW Waterhouse’, The British Art Journal, V, 2 (Autumn 2004), pp15–22. I am grateful to Robin Simon for identifying Dr James Nicoll as the purchaser of the profile sketch of Muriel Foster for Lamia (Pl 2 here) at auction in 1926 and for further information about its history after that date. ↑
- Anthony F Hobson: The Art and Life of J.W. Waterhouse R.A. 1849–1917, London 1980, n. 336. See also idem, JW Waterhouse, London 1989. ↑
- Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites, London 1981 ↑
- Andrew Bolton Marvick, ‘Herself a Psyche; Feminine .Identities in the Art of John William Waterhouse’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 5 (Spring 1996), pp81–95. ↑
- Peter Trippi, J.W. Waterhouse 1849–1917, The Modern Pre-Raphaelite, exh cat., Groninger Museum/Royal Academy of Arts/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008. ↑
- Ken Baker, ‘Miss Sybil Muriel Foster (1884–1974), Chingford Historical Society Newsletter, Autumn Issue (2021), pp3–5. ↑
- I am grateful to Robin Simon for his identification of the collector as Dr James Nicoll. Also see Matthew Jarron’s film about Dr Nicoll’s collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKzEquQ69CI&t=19s ↑