The Artist's Model is a hand painted paperclay OOAK art doll by the fascinating Japanese doll artist Ikuko Miyazaki. This doll is inspired by the famous watercolor, Seated Woman With Bent Knee, painted in 1917 just a year before the end of World War I, by 20th Century Austrian figurative painter Egon Schiele. The doll is approximately 12+ inches from seat to top of bent head, and is approximately 13+ inches long from toe tip to back. A philosophical Existentialist, Schiele was most intrigued by themes of passion, death and the sacred, and characteristically painted sometimes apparently disjointed nudes and self-portraits which express the fragility of the human form and person. Ikuko Miyazaki has captured in this most unusual doll the haunting existentialist and psychological aura of loneliness which so imbued Schiele's portraits, influenced as he was by the psychological fallout of war.

The story of Ikuko Miyazaki's dollmaking is a lesson in history, and is linked to the Japanese tradition of "comfort" or mascot dolls called imon ningyo dolls. These were small hand stitched dolls, surviving ones are now a rare find, which were placed by Japanese women and girls in the "imon bukuro" or "comfort bags" of Japanese military personnel being sent to war, and were intended to console these soldiers. Kamikaze pilots were known to carry them.

As the story is told, the young Miyazaki-san found one such imon ningyo in her own father's desk drawer. Inquiring about it, she soon discovered that this was no ordinary play doll, but something her father treasured with deep emotion and which was not at all to be played with. This particular one made it back to witness her father's wartime experience, and survival. This sense of the importance of a doll, even to a man like her father, sparked an abiding interest in doll making for this little girl, become world class doll artist. She has exhibited in Japan and in Prague, and as our The Artist's Model shows, she has incorporate too the work of another artist whose work is somehow touched by the powerfully impressive experience of war.