Top 10 artistic muses

Maud Gonne. Photo / Supplied

Renee Perle

Photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue was no stranger to beauty, but the Romanian-born model Renee Perle captivated him - and his camera - like no other. In image after image, he paid homage to her style, elegance and great beauty, taking him with her as his mistress/muse as he roamed the rich holiday spots of Cannes and Biarritz in the 1930s. He seems to have literally regarded her as his angel, around whom, he once said: "I see a halo of magic." More recently, she was cited as an inspiration for a collection by the fashion designer John Galliano.

Lee Miller

Miller was at home in front of and behind the camera. She began modelling at 19 in New York, posing for, among others, the great Edward Steichen. At 22, she began working as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris, becoming his lover, creative collaborator and muse. Picasso painted five portraits of her. Later, she married Roland Penrose, the surrealist painter who, in Night and Day, portrayed her as a kind of floating goddess in the sky. Since her death, Miller's reputation has grown. She is now regarded as a great photographer who also happened to be a muse.

Maud Gonne

William Butler Yeats' unrequited love for Maud Gonne was a subject that recurred in his poetry. The 22-year-old first met Yeats in London in 1889, and she steadfastly refused to reciprocate his feelings. He continued to write poetry to her even after her marriage to Major John MacBride, and even proposed to her again after her husband's death in 1916. "Why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery?" he wrote of the aristocratic beauty and fervent Irish nationalist who enthralled, dismayed and inspired him throughout his life.

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery was Lucien Freud's first fleshy, larger-than-life muse. Having witnessed him in full-on performance mode in stilettos, latex body suit and mask at the Anthony d'Offay gallery in 1988, Freud set about painting the exhibitionist in a series of nudes. "I found him perfectly beautiful," Freud later said of his first sight of Bowery completely naked. He portrayed him as a Dionysian figure straight out of a Renaissance painting, both deathly and over-full of life. In Bowery, Freud found his ultimate human landscape.

Sara Lowndes

Like many great artists, Bob Dylan has had many muses, from the passing fancy that was Edie Sedgwick to his first long-term girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. His ex-wife, Sara, though, stands out even in this exalted company. "Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/ Writin' Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you," he sang on his ode to her on 1976's album, Desire. Though Dylan denies it, his album of the previous year, Blood on the Tracks, is a series of heart-wrenching missives to his great lost love and abiding muse.

Arthur Rimbaud

The wild, restless spirit of Rimbaud has been hymned by many 20th-century artists, including Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Jim Morrison. It is Patti Smith, though, who springs immediately to mind when Rimbaud is evoked as a muse. In her poem, devotions. to Arthur Rimbaud, she writes: "Rimbaud was a rolling stone", making explicit the link between the visionary poet and the rock'n'roll pioneers who had also influenced her. More than anyone else, Smith has kept the legacy of Rimbaud alive, while assimilating his style into her own.

Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve is a very modern kind of muse: cool to the point of icy, almost detached in her sense of self-containment. Her particularly French charms - one part exquisite style icon, one part mysterious, unreadable beauty - made her a muse to both Luis Bunuel and Yves St Laurent, whose artistic temperaments could hardly be more different. In Deneuve, Bunuel saw something unreachable that made her the perfect foil for his wilfully perverse, but politically acute films. St Laurent saw her effortless elegance and timeless style. For over 30 years, she was the face of his label, a faithful muse who wore only his creations: the embodiment of a vision.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Few literary muses have embodied an entire age as well as inspiring its most brilliant chronicler. Zelda Fitzgerald was the original wild child of the Roaring Twenties who, in her own words, "did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles". In all this, she was the arbiter not just of the modern age, but for all that has followed, from the cult of celebrity to the idea of the damaged beauty. She was the model for many of her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald's heroines. He once wrote of her: "Sometimes, I don't know if Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters from one of my own novels."

Gala Dali

Born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in 1894, she became lover, wife and muse to the poet Paul Eluard in her early 20s. With him, she became a key figure in the surrealist movement, inspiring Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and Max Ernst. For Breton, she became an emotional tormentor and he later claimed to despise her. She met Salvador Dali, 10 years her junior, in 1929, and became his lifelong muse, inspiring many of his paintings and, according to him, saving him from insanity.

Alice Liddell

The child muse of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 10-year-old Alice Pleasance Liddell was the inspiration for Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland after he spent a "golden afternoon" on July 4, 1862, with Alice and her sisters on a picnic. He also photographed her many times, famously as a beggar child, a portrait that merges fantasy and seriousness in a still slightly disturbing way. The nature of Dodgson's friendship/infatuation with Liddell has become a source of some thorny debate since, but, suffice to say, without Liddell, there would have been no Alice.

- OBSERVER