SESSION: At the Service of Art: Domestic Servants and Their Artists

This panel examines the pivotal role played by an unexpected figure in the lives of artists: the domestic servant. Most artists employed domestic help: they belonged to the higher classes or to the bourgeoisie, for whom having domestic servants was commonplace and a marker of status. Yet servants have not been the subject of much art-historical attention. Examining their lives reveals the specific, often unexpected tasks they performed, ranging from cooking and cleaning to posing for artworks, taking part in an experimental lifestyle, and caring for an artist’s legacy.

Murrell’s (2018) reconsideration of Laure’s role and importance as the black maid in Manet’s Olympia has significantly altered how the artwork is interpreted. More broadly, renewed interest in the depiction of women’s domestic work has highlighted the social and political significance of certain artworks (Thompson and Garber, 2024; Berry, 2025). Building on this research, this panel proposes looking beyond representation to foreground narratives that convey the diverse and crucial roles domestic servants have played in artists’ lives.

This panel welcomes papers which examine how domestic servants enabled artists’ careers and the making of their work. Attention should be paid to broader issues, such as the mechanisms that facilitated their erasure from art history and the power imbalances (in terms of gender, class and race) at the heart of the relationships between artists and domestic servants.

Session Convenor:

Apolline Malevez, Ghent University

Speakers:

Lalie Constantin, Royal Papworth Hospital (Heritage Officer), Kettle’s Yard (University of Cambridge)

Models and Muses: Restoring the Role of Female Servants in Northern Italian Genre Art

This paper examines the overlooked role of domestic servants in shaping artistic depictions of everyday life in sixteenth-century Northern Italy. While the emergence of genre painting in Italy is generally associated with the later works of Carracci, Campi, and Caravaggio, this study argues that an earlier visual interest in the everyday already existed. A corpus of drawings of women performing household tasks, produced between the 1510s and 1540s, reveals an artistic sensitivity to domestic life that preceded the so-called origins of Italian genre painting. For many artists—especially those without families, such as Parmigianino—servants offered the primary opportunity to witness, and therefore capture, this domesticity. The range of works—from spontaneous sketches to more refined, imaginative studies—attests to the prominence and genuine artistic interest in domesticity that servants inspired and modelled. Yet the impact of servants on the development of genre subjects in Italy has been systematically obscured by canonical frameworks. From contemporary Albertian istoria to Panofskian iconography in the early twentieth-century, canonical art-historical models have imposed a narrative—often religious—over domestic scenes. By re-centring servants as the models of Renaissance artists, this paper restores their active role in inspiring new pictorial modes and highlights the canonical models that have long effaced them from art history.

Irene Enslé Bronner, University of Johannesburg

Faithful Friend and Helper’: Dorothy Kay, Annie Mavata, and the ambivalent labour of representation in mid-twentieth-century South Africa

British-born South African Dorothy Kay’s 1956 oil-on-canvas portrait Cookie: Annie Mavata captures the ambivalent intimacy of domestic service, where affection, hierarchy, and labour intersect in the relationship between artist and servant. Drawing on Kay’s memoirs (as recorded by her daughter), diaries, sketchbooks, and family archives, this paper reads Cookie: Annie Mavata through historian Alison Light’s notion of the “loyalty portrait,” in which the servant’s image enhances the employer even as the sitter is acknowledged. Kay’s composition studies honour her subject while reinscribing hierarchies of service, yet Mavata’s assured stance and magnified gaze nevertheless introduce a quiet counter-presence, foregrounding her own narrative and the ways her labour shaped the making of the portrait. Kay’s writings reveal her investment in technical precision and the pictorial labour that substitutes for domestic labour, yet, beyond posing, Mavata materially enabled Kay’s practice, shaping the conditions under which the portrait was conceived and realised. Examining compositional revisions, including the removal of the shelling-peas motif and the subtle suppression of overt labour, the paper argues that Mavata’s contributions are transposed into Kay’s act of representation, preserving her presence even as her labour is formally rendered invisible. Framed by recent feminist and postcolonial scholarship reconsidering the enabling roles of domestic servants in artistic production, this paper situates Cookie: Annie Mavata within mid-twentieth-century South Africa’s racialised and gendered domestic regimes, showing how domestic service both sustained Kay’s career and produced the ambivalence and tensions that the portrait itself encodes.

Rachel Boyd, Laing Art Gallery/Northumbria University

A Sense of Living’: Nerys Johnson and Supported Practice

In 1992, after cuts to her disability benefits and community care, Nerys Johnson (1942-2001) began recruiting ‘artist-facilitators’ to help prepare her workspace for painting. The appearance of her facilitators’ faces within her established oeuvre of flower paintings reflects the support she increasingly relied on from her extensive social network, while the visual analysis of these paintings alongside archival materials such as sketchbooks, correspondence, and diaries reveals the bespoke conditions of their making.

As her access needs grew, the space around her shrank. Adaptations to her home studio, as well as support from her peers, given voluntarily or in-kind, opened up new ways for her to live and work – like how flowers thrive as part of a larger ecosystem.

Drawing on archival research borrowing from the Nerys Johnson Archive and Collection, and the scholarship of Feminist Disability Studies scholars Christine Kelly (2013) and Anna Hickey Moody (2015), I argue that the management of time, space, and resources in Johnson’s adapted home-studio renders this socially reproductive labour central to her practice.

Nerys Johnson’s Facilitator series (1992) troubles conventional notions of autonomy and authorship, raising crucial questions about how we value the work of disabled artists – particularly when this labour has been afforded through the necessary support of other people. By highlighting the crucial yet often overlooked role of Johnson’s artist-facilitators, this paper aligns with efforts to recover the contributions of domestic labour to artistic practice, addressing the mechanisms of erasure which have historically obscured and minimised the work of disabled artists.

Sarah Késenne, LUCA School of arts – Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven)

Who Cleans the Academy? Historicising Cleaning Labour as a Decolonial Feminist Practice

This paper explores the overlooked role of cleaning labour in the recent history of the art academy. While art historical research has examined unlearning teaching pedagogies and representations of household servants in art history (Sternfeld, 2016; Mateus-Berr & Reitstätter, 2017; Garnet and Sinner 2022; Wolfthal, 2022), the role of maintenance and cleaning work within the history of the art academy remains marginalised. Yet cleaning labour sustains the conditions for emancipatory art education by enabling forms of mutual learning that unsettle hierarchies of knowledge and labour. The paper builds on a long-term project that rendered cleaning work within the art academy visible, including a history of cleaning labour in a Belgian art academy campus LUCA School of Arts since the 1980s. It traces the shift from in-house employment to outsourced contracts, situating this transformation within the neoliberal restructuring of higher art education. By foregrounding the histories of racialised women cleaners, the project reconsiders cleaning not as mere maintenance labour but as a vital contribution to the academy’s social and affective fabric. Drawing on Françoise Vergès (2021), the paper frames this history as a decolonial feminist archaeology—an effort to breathe life into what has been condemned to non-existence. The teaching of these histories in art education is proposed as a transformative practice of unlearning that decentralises the institutional history of art education and reimagines its infrastructures of care.