a muse to us all
4x01 - Blair spends her summer getting “lost in a daydream” in front of her favorite painting.
4x22 - Dan “paints” Blair in his book.
The Luncheon on the Grass is a painting of Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model. In Paris, Gossip Girl calls Serena “a muse to us all,” and her montage contains a few nods to Manet’s paintings of Victorine. (In the original draft of the script, Serena even joins a date for a picnic in the park, but I guess the writers thought that would be too obvious.)
Dan is the Manet of Gossip Girl, and Serena is his muse. In S2, he has writer’s block all summer until he sees Serena at the white party. Almost everything Dan writes is about Serena. But Dan gets to know Blair in S4, and when Vanessa discovers Dan’s novel in the finale, she tells him: “a certain someone might actually like the way she’s painted, and I’m not talking about Serena.” In the premiere, Blair was on the outside looking in on the dynamic between an artist and his muse. By the end of the season, she’s become a muse to an artist.