Define the theme of "In An Artist's Studio" by Christina Rossetti.

This poem examines the tendency of men to objectify women
in art and the way that women are shown to suffer as a result. The poem presents us with
a male artist who has one beautiful muse who is the subject of all of his paintings. We
are told that:

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Every canvass
means

The same one meaning, neither more nor
less.

We can see therefore
that in his art the male artist objectifies her and limits her to this "one meaning."
The poem becomes more sinister as we see that "He feeds upon her face by day and night,"
which presents us with an almost vampiric image of how the artist treats this unnamed
woman. As the poem ends it is clear that in a sense the artist is not strictly painting
the woman before him, because the woman he is painting
is:

Not wan
with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was
when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his
dream.

Rossetti thus makes a
harsh critical comment on the way that women are treated as "art" by men and how as a
result they are objectified and used as a "blank canvas" if you will excuse the pun to
allow the artist to "fill his dream" rather than being an object in her own
right.