Themes
Studio artifice against life
The essay's serious point is that the studio shuts out the world. Isolating 'a little corner of life' trains the painter's eye, but it 'leads often to mere mannerism' and 'the constant posing of pretty people' makes modern art artificial and monotonous. Outside the studio 'lies the world of life with its infinite, its Shakespearean variety.' Wilde's image for the failure is the costume model: 'The robe may be the robe of Athens, but the face is usually the face of Brompton.'
The acrobat as Greek ideal
Wilde finds the true heir of Greek sculpture not in the Academy but at the circus. The acrobat's beauty is 'an unconscious result not a conscious aim', the product of precise calculation and training; he is graceful 'because he does what he has to do in the best way in which it can be done.' An ancient Greek, Wilde suggests, would be found at the circus rather than the theatre, and without athletes and acrobats humanity would 'degenerate into a race of short-sighted professors and spectacled précieuses.'
Indifference to art
Much of the comedy turns on the models' complete lack of interest in art. They 'rarely look at a picture, and never venture on any æsthetic theories', accept every school 'with the grand catholicity of the auctioneer', and care only that the studio is warm and the lunch hot. Wilde uses them to tease the critics, whose ideal they fulfil by passing no criticisms, and in the last line he turns the joke on the public, which is also more interested in artists than in art.
Class and respectability
Wilde's models belong to a particular London world: girls who live with their parents and help support the house, keep diaries of their engagements and dress neatly. He dwells, with amused surprise, on their 'extreme respectability' and their habit of marrying well. The poor, he adds, 'are completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness': street boys think the painter is laughing at them, or take him for a philanthropist handing out alms by an eccentric method.