Fanny Eaton was a muse for several famous Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rebecca and Simeon Solomon, Joanna Mary Boyce, and Frederick Sandys. She modeled in several famous paintings at a time when whiteness was seen as the beauty ideal and those of African descent were relegated to the background—if they appeared in Western art at all.
Fanny was born in Surrey, Jamaica only months after the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Her mother, Matilda Foster, was a former slave. Her father is not known. However, there is speculation that her father might have been a British soldier named James Entwistle, who died only days after her birth.
In the 1840s, Fanny moved to London with her mother. She found work as a domestic servant, which paid poorly and barely allowed them to survive. By 1857, Fanny was cohabitating with a cab driver named James Eaton in London’s Coram Fields. They would go on to have ten children.
Outside of her work as a domestic servant, Fanny somehow found work as a portrait model at the Royal Academy. It is not clear when or how she started this career. However, this is potentially where she caught the eyes of several famous Victorian painters.
One such artist was Simeon Solomon. Her breakthrough as an artist’s model happened when she was featured in his painting The Mother of Moses. This piece was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, and at the age of twenty-five, Fanny quickly found herself a popular subject amongst the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Even though Fanny sat as the central figure for many paintings of the period, there are still examples where she was banished to the background or merely included as a decorative piece. In John Everett Millais’ Jephthah (1867), she is in the background in the far right, beneath the curtain, wearing a yellow hood. In another work by Millais, The Pearl of Great Price (1860), Fanny is shoved off to the left side. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved (1861), Fanny is barely visible in the top right corner. She is hidden behind a cluster of white women with a child of African descent in the foreground holding a vase. The reason for the child’s presence in Rossetti’s painting is still hotly debated to this day.
However, there are other paintings where Fanny is the central figure or the only figure. In Joanna Mary Boyce’s Head of a Mulatto Woman (Mrs. Eaton) (1861), Fanny is the sole subject of the painting. She appears regal in her bearing. In Albert Moore’s The Mother of Sisera (1861), Fanny is the sole figure staring out a window. Other artists like Frederick Sandys and Walter Fryer Stocks created marvelous sketches featuring her pink-tinted lips and coily hair.
Fanny regularly sat as a model in the Royal Academy throughout the 1860s. There are records for a “Mrs. Eaton” sitting for three sessions at two hours each. She was paid fifteen shillings per session, which was standard for portrait models at the time. By the 1870s, a “Miss Eaton” entered the Royal Academy’s record as a model. It is possible this was one of Fanny’s children.
By 1881, Fanny was widowed. She worked as a seamstress to support herself and her children, the last of her brood having been born in 1879. She worked as a domestic cook for a wine merchant on the Isle of Wight. Fanny moved to Hammersmith and Fulham, a borough in London, to live with one of her daughters until her death in 1924. She was buried at Margravine Cemetery, also known as Hammersmith Cemetery.
Fanny was used by white Pre-Raphaelite painters to stand in for the “exotic other” in their works. She was rarely, if ever, depicted as Jamaican, but rather as various Biblical, “Oriental,” and exotic figures. Few made her central to her work as what she was, a woman of African descent living in Victorian London. However, it cannot be doubted that she was influential to many painters in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She was featured in many paintings as an empowered woman, a central figure, and a muse.
No records in Fanny’s own words survive. No letters, no diaries, no papers. We have no insight into her thoughts or feelings on her life as a domestic or the difficulty in finding work as a painter’s model when the beauty ideal was pale skin and blond hair. Art historians today continue to identify her in artwork from the period. It is important to continue to mine this history around Fanny, because the women who modeled for the Pre-Raphaelite painters, most of whom were white, sculpted how we view the artist’s muse and beauty. If we learn more about Fanny and other women like her, we move their histories from the margins and to the forefront, a space that she sat within and owned in so many paintings and sketches.
Resources
Black British women pioneers: Fanny Eaton by Jill Lupupa, on My Goddess Complex
Fanny Eaton at the Royal Academy by Annette Wickham, on the Royal Academy
Fanny Eaton: The Black Pre-Raphaelite Muse that Time Forgot by Shola von Reynolds, on AnOther Magazine
Fanny Eaton, the Jamaican-born model in Millais’ Jephthah by Stephanie Roberts, on Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales
FANNY EATON, PRE-RAPHAELITE MUSE from Marina’s Muses
The Mother of Sisera, Albert Joseph Moore (1841–1893) from Art UK
Who Is Fanny Eaton? The Jamaican Model Who Inspired the Pre-Raphaelites Is the Latest Art-World Figure to Get a Google Doodle by Sarah Cascone, on Artnet News
