Sylvia Sleigh (8 May 1916 – 24 October 2010) was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway. Early life and education Sleigh was born in Llandudno, and raised in England. She studied at the Brighton School of Art. For a time, she worked at a clothing shop in Bond Street, where she recalled "undressing Vivien Leigh". Sleigh later opened her own business in Brighton, England, where she made hats, coats, and dresses until she closed her shop at the start of World War II. She returned to painting and moved to London in 1941 after marrying her first husband, an English painter named Michael Greenwood. Her first solo exhibition was in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery in London. Sleigh met her second husband, Lawrence Alloway, an English curator and art critic, while taking evening classes to study art history at the University of London; they married in 1954 and moved to the United States in 1961. The following year, Alloway became a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Work and feminism Male nudes Around 1970, from feminist principles, she painted a number of works reversing stereotypical artistic themes by featuring nude men in poses that were traditionally associated with women, like the reclining Venus or odalisque. Some directly alluded to existing works, such as Philip Golub Reclining (1971), which appropriates the pose of the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez. The model was the son of the artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. This work also presents a reversal of the male-artist/female-muse pattern typical of the Western canon and is reflective of research into the position of women throughout the history of art as model, mistress, and muse, but rarely as artist−genius. Unlike earlier male artists, Sleigh individualized her nude subjects instead of representing them as generalized types. The Turkish Bath (1973), a similarly gender-reversed version of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of the same name, depicts a group of artists and art critics, including her husband, Lawrence Alloway (reclining at the lower right), Carter Ratcliff,