The woman in the picture

THE curious thing was that complete strangers kept recognising Cecilia

Green. She was a beautiful young woman, and this might have been a

chat-upline, but they kept asking the same thing. Was she Sir Russell

Flint's model? It was an embarrassing enough question, particularly for

one who had never heard of the Scottish artist, let alone seen anything

of his work.

Someone showed her a published album, and she thought that Flint's

plates were ''absolutely brilliant''. She was captivated, and yes there

were some resemblances between Cecilia and the figures in pictures like

Three Gypsies in Languedoc, or between her and the Spanish dancer

Consuelito Carmona, one of the models acknowledged by name in the

compositions.

That was the chance connection. Flint had often used dancers from the

London stage, or ballet performers like Moira Shearer. Cecilia Green's

career as a soloist with the Festival Ballet in London had ended

abruptly when she contracted tuberculosis at the age of 21. She had been

two years in hospital.

''They say in ballet if you've missed a class for one day you know

it,'' she explains. If you miss a class for two days the teacher knows

it. If you miss a class for three days the audience knows it.''

This was 1953 and she didn't know what to do with herself. She had

nothing else to fall back upon. No education. No prospects. Ballet had

been her life since the age of 11. Today she might have gone into

physical theatre, or a less exacting dance form. Back then there were

few options for a working-class girl from East London who had just had

her vocation snatched away from her. There was just this recurring

question about modelling for an artist whose popularity and commercial

appeal had reached its height after he had entered his seventies.

''I was intrigued,'' she confesses. ''But also I needed some money. I

needed some work.'' She says she was persuaded, but she had probably

made up her own mind to seek out Sir William Russell Flint. She looked

him up in Who's Who. She found his phone number in the book. It was a

wet April afternoon and she took the underground over from Hackney to

the unfamiliar world of Notting Hill Gate. There, at the tube station,

she went into a phone box and rang his number.

''He was slightly deaf,'' she recalls. ''I was very naive. I thought

that all famous people would have butlers, but he answered himself and

he was obviously nervous about using the telephone, so he sounded very

brusque. A bit rude and unpleasant. I told him I was a model. He said he

didn't want a model.

''I told him, well, I'm just round the corner. Could you just see me

for a minute? He said, 'You can come if you like. But I don't want a

model.' Bang -- the phone. I thought, I'm not going. But I decided I'd

come all this way. I'd go and see him. He couldn't kill me. I found a

taxi.''

She has said that when the artist opened the door it was as though he

was being confronted by an apparition. He had been trying to paint this

woman all his life. And now she was standing on his doorstep. People

would compare her in those days to Audrey Hepburn, as they would later

compare her to Sophia Loren, her dark, sultry looks inherited through

her Jewish blood, through Russian and middle-European antecedents who

had gone into exile in France, Argentina and now England.

The name had been Grunvogel (green bird) assimilated into simple

Green. She had a magnificent profile, a statuesque neck and a taut,

supple physique, the product of the discipline and stretching exercises

of ballet training.

''I'm sure he smiled,'' she says. ''He had a nice smile. Sweet-looking

man, not handsome. He took me upstairs to his 80ft-long studio, 25ft

high. And that was it.''

Over the next 13 years Cecilia Green would become the artist's

principal model. She became ubiquitous in the late flourish of Sir

William Russell Flint, so that she was identified universally by

collectors as the Flint woman, and this time correctly. He had a star

system for his models that he committed to his diary. Like a

luxuriously-appointed hotel, she was his five-star turn, his favourite,

his inspiration and obsession.

''I didn't like it,'' she says today. ''But then I never liked it.

Never became used to it. But as I say, it was all I could do. I could

have been a shop assistant, or something like that. It paid badly, but

it paid something. I would be earning about 30 shillings a day at the

start.

''He didn't want anybody else. As far as he was concerned, I could

come in every day. But I couldn't stand modelling every day. It was

horrid and boring, and painful, and tiring, and boring again.''

She is talking about this 40 years later. We have met at her West

London home. Cecilia Green, at 63, is still a striking woman. The

profile and the neck are enduring features, but she warns that she can

neither be flattered nor insulted.

She adds: ''I've always been fairly practical. I knew how I was, as

far as I could go. I knew the deficits. It's very difficult to flatter

me, because I flattered myself. And it's very difficult to insult me,

because you could not insult me more than I have myself. I know exactly

what's wrong with me: the arms too short, feet too weak. Now I wouldn't

even begin to criticise my physical appearance, because I'd be here for

a year. Then there wasn't a lot wrong.''

On the sofa we are leafing through one of her books of Flint. She

stops at the 1960 watercolour, A Reclining Nude. ''Isn't that a gorgeous

nude!'' she asks rhetorically. ''It's lovely. Everything about it.''

This has to be taken as an objective critique, because the subject is

patently Cecilia Green. ''Yes,'' she confirms. ''Actually, that looked

like me. That's what I really looked like.''

Then, as afterthought or an explanation, she pursues this idea of her

connection, one that she underplays. ''I never really saw it as me,''

she confesses. ''It was a picture. Even a portrait of 'Cecilia'.

Cecilia's this or Cecilia's that. It's not me, it's a name. There's lots

of people called Cecilia. I didn't see them as portraits of me. Just

pictures.''

She was like an actress taking on a variety of different roles in the

artist's imagination. There was a strongly theatrical element in Flint's

work, and the figures were added back at the studio, after he had

captured the setting on his trips, often in France, Spain or Italy.

''He'd never paint me in a picture on site,'' explains Cecilia. ''He'd

paint in the background. Bring them back from France to paint in the

figures.''

This became a matter of collaborative discussion between artist and

model. ''He'd say, what can we do with this?'' Poses were never dictated

by the artist. The model would agree a theatrical ambiguity, a narrative

element to the picture, and essay her own pose to bring a life to the

picture. Sometimes it was a purely decorative element. Sometimes it

suggested a story that the viewer could follow. Always it supplied the

final dynamic for the work.

It irritates Cecilia Green that the surviving reputation of Flint,

among the collectors and London dealers at least, emphasises the nudes

of the late period, and neglects his sublime skill in watercolours of

rare luminescence and depth, achieving masterpiece after masterpiece

among his landscapes and wonderfully angled observations of buildings

and the human activity surrounding them.

''The British get so worked up because of his nudes,'' she complains.

''It's pathetic and puerile. Because he painted a beautiful woman there

was no way that he could make me or any of his other models, there was

no way he could make us less beautiful if he was going to do it

properly. We did not have pock marks or spots, any of us. We were

gorgeous girls. And why should you make a girl, who is actually

gorgeous, ugly? Who could have done that? Perhaps Lucien Freud.

''Willie was a lovely man, but completely misunderstood by the

critics. They say he must have been a kinky character who,

extraordinarily enough, liked painting beautiful women. That was

considered kinky. If he'd liked painting great, fat models like Bessie

Braddock or Eleanor Roosevelt in the nude that would have been very

successful -- with the critics. But because his models happened to be

the most beautiful girls in London, he is undervalued today.''

Cecilia Green split with Flint in August 1966. She had been wavering

for a while. In 1960, she had made the break for several months and

appeared in television adverts as the Camay girl. Her marriage, in 1958

to John Simmons, reinforced her sense of rebellion, although the husband

and the artist got along very well and she was encouraged to continue

with her modelling. Finally, she had to say she'd had enough. Flint was

distraught. His diaries record his black depression.

''I always hated modelling,'' she confides. ''It bored me to tears.

Though I loved Willie in a way. He was lovely, sweet and gentle. He was

very intelligent, witty in a Victorian way. Clean-minded and decent. But

you take the person you love most and put them in a room with you for

hours and hours without talking, and see how kindly you will feel about

them at the end of the day. I was screaming to get out.''

Cecilia Green remains an authority on Flint. There are prints and

drawings by Flint in her elegant living room, along with a couple of

Rouault mono-prints. An accomplished sketcher and painter in her own

right, Cecilia has made an affectionate parody of the Flint style in

Russell Flint In Piccadilly Circus, in which the model turns artist to

reprise some 35 of her famous poses.

Yet she slightly resents the popularity her name and presence has

given to his prints and reproductions, the ones best remembered by the

public. She is uncomfortable with the fact that a Cecilia now boosts the

price. ''Why me?'' she responds. ''It's nothing to do with me. It's the

way he painted me.''