Published as a popular print, Reclining Nude III is one of the most famous depictions of Flint’s favourite muse Cecilia Green (1931-2003), a beautiful, talented and intelligent young woman who appears in many of the artist's greatest pictures from 1953 when they first.mes t, in roles as diverse as a Spanish flamenco dancer and a French nun in a convent. For thirteen years Green’s face and physique dominated Flint’s work and with the huge popularity of his prints, she graced the walls of thousands of homes. She became so famous that she was often recognised in the street – much to her embarrassment as complete strangers would introduce themselves to her knowing what she looked like when she was naked.
‘I never really saw it as me. It was a picture. Even a portrait of 'Cecilia'. Cecilia's this or Cecilia's that. It's not.mes , it's a name. There's lots of people called Cecilia. I didn't see them as portraits of me. Just pictures.’
Cecilia's parents were clothes makers of Russian Jewish descent (their name was originally Grunvogel) whose ancestors had fled Kiev before the revolution, lived in France and Argentina and finally settled in London. Cecilia grew up in the East End of London, her childhood marred by the war and long periods of ill-health. Malnutrition led to her suffering badly from rickets but despite her childhood frailty she grew into a determined, confident and strikingly handsome young woman who wanted nothing more than to dance professionally. After a period at dance school she became a member of the London Festival Ballet and attended modelling-classes at the London Camera Club. She was destined for greatness on the stage but when she was twenty-one she contracted tuberculosis and spent two years in hospital.
‘They say in ballet if you've missed a class for one day you know it. If you miss a class for two days the teacher knows it. If you miss a class for three days the audience knows it.’
Her dance career was over. Ballet had been her life and since the age of eleven she had known nothing else. It was 1953 and she had no education, no money and very few prospects. The only thing she had was her beauty and she realised that she had learnt how to be graceful and how to withstand the rigours of adopting difficult poses for prolonged periods. She had long legs well-shaped by her dancing training and she knew how beautiful she was. She could be of use to artists.
‘I needed the money. I needed the work.’
Cecilia had seen prints of the watercolours of William Russell Flint and decided that she could pose as well as the likes of Moira Shearer (star of The Red Slippers) and Ray Fuller, dancers that he already employed for his pictures. She found his telephone number and address in a copy of Who’s Who in the local library and one wet April day in 1953 put on her raincoat and caught the underground from Hackney to Notting Hill Gate, an area she did not know (she was a Cockney born and bred). In the tube station she found a telephone box, dialed the number and waited for a reply with her coins nervously clutched in her hand.
‘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.’
Nervously she knocked on the door of Flint’s studio-house on the Corner of Peel Street and Campden Hill. When the disgruntled artist opened the door, his face flushed with annoyance, he was greeted by the sight of a woman who was in possession of the type of beauty he had wanted to paint for his entire career and had only now discovered aged 72. Cecilia had a look that was somewhere between the exotic screen-siren beauties Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren with the more demure look of Audrey Hepburn – actresses whose fame made this type of beauty fashionable in the 1960s when Cecilia was posing. Flint later recalled that she was like an ‘apparition’ standing on his doorstep, dripping with rainwater.
‘I'm sure he smiled. 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.’
Despite his obvious attraction to her, Flint only over-stepped the line once when he proposed marriage in an uncharacteristically passionate outburst. She did not feel the same way but loved him like she would a kindly uncle. Flint’s wife was confined to a nursing home due to her arthritis so Cecilia acted as more than a model; acting as his secretary and accountant and she even took on responsibilities such as cutting his finger-nails. She was also the hostess at the studio when parties were held and it was here that she met celebrities such as Peter Cushing and Peter Sellers. However she wanted more from life than posing for an artist who was three t.mes s older than her.
‘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.’
In 1966 Cecilia, now married to the art consultant John Simmons, looked for a way out of being an artist’s model and sought work in various advertising campaigns, including becoming the face of Camay soap. Her departure from Flint's life left him distraught. On the evening after her last posing session for Flint in August 1966 she telephoned him to make sure he was not too upset – he refused to speak to her that day or any other day and he did not.mes ntion her once in his autobiography despite the important role she played in his art. He died five years later. Cecilia never spoke of Flint with anything other than a deep regard and affection for a man who treated her gently and paternally. Although she did not enjoy posing she was proud of the role she played in his art and irritated by suggestions that there was something immodest about the pictures of her naked.
‘The British get so worked up because of his nudes. 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.’