My great-grandfather managed to combine respectable and not so. Arthur Bowen Davies was a fairly prominent US artist at the time and president of the Armory Exhibition in 1913, championing modern artists--though his own art was not precisely pathbreaking--mostly nymphs and melancholy landscapes, with just a few ventures into cubism.

But he also got close--real close--to one of his models. The model and her daughter showed up on the doorstep of his wife after he died mysteriously in Italy in 1928. He's been my role model--well, maybe not the dying part.

Of course, he probably was prudent, for all sorts of reasons, not to make his arrangement with the model too obvious. He didn't know it--may never have known it--but his wife, at age 19, had killed her first husband. She eloped with him on a train from Huntsville AL to Chattanooga, then found he was a gambler and opium addict. They separated.   He met her in the street with a pistol and ordered her to return to him. So she shot him (with the pistol he had given her mother after an earlier scene had resulted in his backing down.) She had it in her pocket at the time of their street encounter. It probably helped her case that, before he died, he described her shooting him as self-defense.

After her acquittal, she left Tennessee and went to NY , where having studied under Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first US woman MD, she became a doctor. She delivered over 4,000 babies during her career.