[unknown] Fusco

Identity:

He was a professional model. Fusco is a fairly uncommon name, but there was a family of that name based in Bradford, and later Edinburgh. For instance, in the 1881 census two Italian-born British subjects, Benedetto Fusco, aged 30, and Michelangelo Fusco, aged 23, travelling musicians, were recorded in Bradford, Yorkshire.

Life:

He posed for a drypoint, Fusco [106], in 1872. He may have been a model at life-classes organised by Victor Barthe (b. ca 1839), which Whistler attended in the 1870s.

According to Walter Greaves, Whistler made nude studies when working on the portrait Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F. R. Leyland y097, in the early 1870s. Greaves remembered that Whistler kept rubbing the painting down and eventually got 'a well-known Italian model named Fosco to pose nude for the figure.' It is probable that the name was Fusco rather than Fosco.

Bibliography:

UK census 1881. Walter and H. Greaves (Pupils of Whistler), Goupil Gallery, London, 1922, pp. 19-20.

Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website (cat. no. 106).