Vanessa Bell's Poem 'The Sitter'

“The Sitter”
What do you think the author is trying to say about the difference about art and reality?
How does she use poetic techniques to present these ideas?

“The Sitter” is about a sitter who feels that the portrait that she is in misrepresents her, or does not appreciate everything about her. For example, the phrase, “I may have looked like that” shows that although the sitter may look like one thing on the outside, she doesn’t feel that that is the whole representation of her. Also, “The Sitter” is written in the first person. This may have been done to allow the reader to connect with the narrator’s emotions, as the poem focuses on someone as a whole, including their emotions, rather than just what they look like.

The theme
The general mood of the poem is quite gloomy, for example “She made me feel ashamed. My face went red”. This may have been done to represent the bad feelings that she has about her experience, and that possibly, that one moment of being a sitter, may have affected the rest of her life, as the general mood of the whole poem is negative. However, this is interspersed with moments of happiness and positivity. For example, Vanessa bell writes “some people made me smile, they made me shine, they made me beautiful”. This shows that, although the narrator may have been feeling generally negative, there were moments of happiness, which contrasts with the ‘moment’ of the painting, described in the first few lines. Vanessa Bell uses poetic techniques to portray the emotions that the sitter was feeling during the sitting. For example, “Depressed and disagreeable and fat” shows how depressed the sitter was feeling. The use of the list of three shows how bad she must have been feeling as she is listing several things that could be considered as faults. Also, the use of the first “and” rather than the conventional comma, further presents this fact, as they are clearly separated out, making each one seem just as significant as each