The Competition for the Prize for the Study of Emotion

In 1759 the Royal Academy instituted a competition requiring students to draw the head of a model showing a specific emotion--in this case, gentleness. Although the Academy regularly employed nude male models for advanced drawing students to sketch academies, it was only for this competition that the Academy hired female models, who posed for the students fully dressed. (The use of nude female models for academy studies was not common until the nineteenth century.)