The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-01-28
EARNING | LIVING
 BY DOING NOTHING Hard Working People Are Paid
 to Keep Quiet LIFE OF ARTISTS MODELS Professional Poser. Once a Circus Performer, Talks About the New
 "stunt"-Men Who Pose
 Year After Year.
LIFE OF ARTISTS MODELS

Boston, January 2-(SpeciaL )-About the hardest worked people in the world are those who for hours at a time do absolutely nothing but keep quiet. At this time of the year. when the art schools are full of pupils and every sue cessful painter. sculptor and Illustrator is deep in work. the professional model who stands without turning a hand from days beginning to days end has em- ployment for every minute of every hour. His life Is a hard. exacting one. The spectacular side, particularly that of the women models, who pose for popular illustrators. is pretty familiar though full page features" in Sunday newspa- pers, but the downright severe labor of ordinary posing, with the aroma of Bo- hemianism left out-that Is the real story of the professional poseur.
 hard life, as has just been said. Only the men models, in fact, can endure it for any length of time. Women come and go, have their little day of becoming Famous as the models from whom prize pictures or world-renowned mural decor htions are painted, and then disappear. Less is written of the men models, but they are a more constant factor. With many of them 1t is a regular business, learned laboriously and followed out through many years. Some of the men are cosmopolitan wanderers, pos ing now for a few weeks in New York or Philadelphia, now in Boston now in western city or again turning up in one of the art centers of the old world, where the wages are less but the expenses of living correspondingly lower.
 Most Famous Bohemian.
 A Bohemian of this type is the most Famous of them all an Italian, who since he was discoveed at the age of II years by distinguished painter in a little town of Italy, has posed for almost every great artist of modern times and Tor the students of almost every art school. The drawings and paintings made from him are almost innumerable With profile like that of Sioux h. dian, and long, black hair of a sort sell dom seen outside of Buffalo Bill show he is everywhere welcomed as he fol- lows his route from studio to studio from school to school. wherever the reg ulation price of 90 cents an hour awaits him.
 Other models stick to one city. A well built man of German extraction in Bos- ton has been posing steadily for the To- cal artists and the classes of the School Of the Museum of Fine Arts for nineteen years. In that time he has never trav- eled further from home than New York, and then only for brief engagements He is always busy Rarely in the season does he have a spare forenoon or after noon, and even in his evening hours he gives lessons in physical culture. Yet the hard work of posing has not worn him out, because he takes care of him. self
 In speaking of his experiences this model says that the poseur's salvation consists in reducing his work to a science. A haf oh, pain of soon ceasing to get engagements at all.
 "A fellow gets up before class of stu dents,' he says, lat 9 o'clock in the morning and falls into his pose. That isn't so hard. It's keeping the pose a whole week without changing the char aeter of it that is so difficult You've got to remember and you've got to do some thinking. Most models consider only the end of their weeks work and the money they will get then While they are thinking about that and specu- lating how they are going to spend it they begin to fidget on the model stand. the body sways backward and forward in sort of rythmic way and soon the model has slumped into something very different from what he started with.
 Must Stand Still.
 Well that won't do at all, will it? None of the artists who teach in the museum are going to stand for that. You see there are perhaps forty or fifty young men or young women in the class and every little shift or turn you make disconcerts somebody. The beginners es- pecialy have been used to drawing from the casts. and if you don't stand pretty still they get perplexed and puzzled. Then they become discouraged. The h. structor finds they're not advancing and wonders what's the matter with them. It isn't their fault, of course It's the fault of a model who isn't interested in what he is doing.
 But the real professional-and there are only a very few of us in this busi- ness-is all the time thinking how he can carry out the idea expressed in his pose. Keeping still without becoming llstless is the hardest thing in the world to do. I have performed feats with cir cuses, taught physical culture, assisted at demonstrations in anatomy classes, where I have made myself at will into living skeleton or a fat man, and done a lot of other things that I am going to put into my autobiography when 1 write 1t; but tell you, none of the stunts [ have ever performed is as difficult as that of just standing perfectly still on the model block and not moving a quar- ter of an inch to right or left.
 'Tt isn't the first fifteen minutes that hurts; it's the occasional prolongation after your regular stopping time. Ordi- narily a recess comes after three-quar- ters of an hour, but sometimes, when the instructor is criticising a large class l hold pose for two hours or more without rest. They always tell me, of course, to stop. but I know it pleases