In an Artist’s Studio–

In summary, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ is about the male artist’s tendency to objectify his female sitters or ‘models’ for his paintings and sculptures; the woman is merely a passive object on which the artist projects his fantasies and Christina Rossetti ‘dreams’. Written by a woman, the poem at first seems confusing  The artist is seen as a sort of predator or parasite, ‘feed[ing] upon’ the face of the female model – ‘by day and night’, we learn, the odd mention of ‘night’ suggesting some sort of male monster or demon. Rossetti seeks to demonstrate how women are treated and how they are viewed. This poem examines the tendency of men to objectify women in art and the way that women are shown to suffer as a result. The poem presents us with a male artist who has one beautiful muse who is the subject of all of his paintings. We can see therefore that in his art the male artist objectifies her and limits her to this “one meaning.” The poem becomes more sinister as we see that “He feeds upon her face by day and night,” which presents us with an almost vampiric image of how the artist treats this unnamed woman. As the poem ends it is clear that in a sense the artist is not strictly painting the woman before him, because the woman he is painting is merely an object for his satisfaction.