Legend has it that there were four muses, said to be daughters of Zeus.

Rawsthorne had a more earthly beginning; born in 1912, the daughter of a Liverpool mariner. Yet if anyone ever deserved the title of muse, it was her.

The works she inspired are not recognised as great works of art – though by no means are they dismissed – but it is the sheer number of artists this woman inspired that is most impressive.

Attending the Liverpool School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, she worked as a painter and designer of ballets. It is not, however, as an artist that she is most remembered, but as a subject.

Her face and figure live on in the works of Epstein, Andre Derain, Picasso, and – abundantly, even obsessively – in those of the two artists closest to her, in very different ways: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

Sir Edouardo Paolozzi remembers her entering a restaurant in the Forties: "The diners were transfixed by her beauty and all the raised forks remained suspended in the air until the glamorous woman was seated."

Her effect on the sculptor Giacometti was even more profound. The memory of a glimpse he once caught of her standing at midnight on the Boulevard Saint-Michel – remote, imperious – lies behind all his sculptures of extraordinarily thin, unreachable women.

Her relationship with Francis Bacon was quite different, that of friend and drinking companion; yet hers is one of the faces that haunts his work. One remembered sight of her lay behind one of his most celebrated pictures, Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho 1967.

The Harewood House Summer/Autumn exhibition opened this week and gives visitors a chance to see one of the works Rawsthorne inspired close up.

Jacob Epstein's bronze of Rawsthorne, Isabel, has until now stood in the Earl and Countess of Harewood's gardens, a part of their private collection which was previously unseen by the public. Epstein was the first artist to fall for her charms, creating the bronze bust, in which she is bare-breasted but wearing enormous earrings, in 1933.

Sarah Brown, curator of contemporary projects at Harewood, says it is a wonderful opportunity for the public to have a chance to see the sculpture up close, but also to see work by Rawsthorne herself.

Brown says: "She was an artist herself and a muse to many. The Earl and Countess allowed us to put the Epstein bronze of her in our collection and a private collector gave us two of Rawsthorne's own paintings. It is fascinating when you see someone who was portrayed by all these different artists, the work that she actually created herself."

Brown likens Rawsthorne to an early supermodel, but it is the combination of her looks and her personality which intrigued so many.

According to James Lord, the biographer of Giacometti, she was "tall, lithe, superbly proportioned" and "moved with the agility of a feline predator. Something exotic, suggesting obscure origins, was visible in her full mouth, high cheek-bones, and heavy-lidded, slanting eyes, from which shone forth a gaze of exceptional, though remote, intensity."

In the '50s and '60s, she designed sets and costumes for a number of ballets, starting in 1951 with Tiresias, the last composition of her third husband, Constant Lambert. Ballet dancers became a favourite subject. Then, after a trip to Africa in 1961, she produced African landscapes.

During her lifetime, however, it was largely as a personality that she made her impact. As much as the way she looked, it was an inner vitality, an attitude to life, that impressed people.

The bust on display at Harewood acted as an introduction to her first husband, the foreign correspondent Sefton Delmer. He wrote in his autobiography that he already fallen in love with Isabel's image before the pair first met in Paris in 1934, recording: "Isabel gazed at me with wide-open, friendly eyes and then the bronze that had turned to flesh spoke."

Married to Delmer, she was installed in a luxurious apartment and immediately plunged into artistic and intellectual Paris. The first painter she intrigued was André Derain, who produced Portrait of Isabel in 1963.

Next, Alberto Giacometti fell deeply in love with her and at the same time Picasso started to take an interest in her. She is reported as saying: "Picasso used to sit at the table opposite and one day, after staring at me particularly hard, he jumped up and said to Alberto: 'Now I know how to do it.' He dashed back to his studio to paint my portrait with little red eyes, wild hair and a vertical mouth – one of five he painted from memory."

She went on to marry the composer Constant Lambert and after he died, in 1951, she married his friend and fellow composer Alan Rawsthorne and it was then that she met and became a model for Francis Bacon.

His most famous portrait of her is Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne 1966.

Epstein and Isabel: Artist and Muse is at Harewood House until November 2.