Accomplished artist and photographer, Dora Maar. has inevitably been overshadowed by her lover Pablo Picasso, who most famously depicted her as the Weeping Woman (1937). They met in a Parisian café after Picasso saw Maar playing a game in which she stabbed a penknife between her fingers into the wood of the table to attract his attention. Maar introduced Picasso to photography and her left-wing politics, which infused paintings such as this. Look inside the eyes, which have black war planes for pupils, indicating the anti-war stance that the pair took.

An influential art critic and curator, who worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Lawrence Alloway posed for his artist-wife, Sylvia Sleigh, more than 50 times. Sleigh portrayed him naked on many occasions, lying in bed, reclining on the sofa or positioned in gender-swapped masterpieces. Moreover, in The Bride (1949), Alloway appears as Sleigh's cross-dressing, Renaissance-style bride, toying with constructed gender roles. Alloway posed for Sleigh in a true act of allyship with her feminist vision – that both male and female muses be seen on equal terms.

Among David Hockney's most significant subjects is American photographer and artist, Peter Schlesinger (b.1948). It was LA-based Schlesinger who invited Hockney into his world of swimming pools in back gardens, including his own family's. Hockney's muse provided him with career-changing subject matter – he subsequently reworked the tradition of bathers in art through a homoerotic lens.

Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862) is synonymous with Shakespeare's tragic heroine, as she modelled for John Everett Millais' Ophelia (1851–1852). But we must separate the real-life woman from the character she played: Siddal was an artist and poet who successfully exhibited with the Pre-Raphaelites in the UK and US.

Art history's obsession with Siddal, and 'white' beauty, has cast a shadow over other Pre-Raphaelite muses, including Fanny Eaton (1835–1924). The Jamaican-born muse came to London as a child, shortly after the abolition of slavery in British colonies. After modelling for Simeon Solomon's The Mother of Moses, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, Eaton was soon in demand amongst the other Pre-Raphaelite painters. Moreover, by modelling for the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and Joanna Mary Wells, she helped redefine Victorian standards of beauty, at a time when Black individuals were significantly underrepresented, and often negatively represented, in Western art.