Dictionary of Artists’ Models

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”, Lord Byron is said to have remarked in 1812, and the same thing happened in 1975 to a man who started out in life as Dennis Pratt. The key event was the screening in the UK of a dramatised documentary based on his memoir The Naked Civil Servant. Many years beforehand he had found his vocation as an art school model, developed a personal philosophy that might be characterised as “passive exhibitionism”, and presented himself to the world as a living objet trouvé called Quentin Crisp.

This celebrated individualist is among...