In what way can the poem be read as a feminist poem?

“In an Artist’s Studio” can be also be seen as Rossetti offering a critique of artists' objectification of women in art. Too often, the argument goes, women are seen simply as an artist’s muse, as the highest object of artistic representation, no doubt leading to the gross reduction and simplification of women, even to the point where they become interchangeable. The poem invokes this idea quite explicitly; upon entering the studio, the speaker is struck by the fact that although the artist may attempt to create a new portrait each time he paints, he seemingly can do nothing more than produce the same meaning, the same face again and again.

This objectification of women as the muse of art has some biographical basis in Rossetti’s life; her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on whose studio and artistic obsession with his wife (Elizabeth Siddal) Rossetti based this poem, considered Christina to be his “first muse.” When he fell in love with Siddal, Christina was displaced as the source of Dante’s inspiration, and instead began producing her own profound work. In doing so, she commented on her pre-Raphaelite brother’s tendency to flatten and homogenize all feminine representation to the point of idealized identicality.