Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

BACKSTORY
Forgotten
beauty
Among the works of the nineteenthcentury
British Pre-Raphaelite artists, one
mysterious face recurs, and stands out
for its “exotic” beauty. It belonged to the
artists’ model Fanny Eaton, a mixed-race
Jamaican woman who found herself for
a time at the heart of London’s Victorian
art world. As Judy Raymond writes,
relatively little is known about her life
— but her image survives in some of the
world’s most famous museums
When Fanny Eaton died in
west London on March 4,
1924, her memories were
already lost to senility. She
had worked as a cleaner,
a seamstress, and a cook,
and raised most of her ten children on her own after
being widowed in her forties.
But the life of this brown-skinned old lady full of
years, though often modest, had been a remarkable
one in other ways. By the time she died at eightynine,
Eaton must have had an English accent for
decades, and blended into the London workingclass
milieu in which she lived. But she was born
in the parish of St Andrew, eastern Jamaica, on
23 June, 1835 — less than a year after emancipation.
Her mother, Matilda Foster, may have been a
domestic servant, on an estate or in a town, or even
a field labourer on a sugar plantation before she gave
birth to Fanny at seventeen. Matilda and her own
mother, Bathsheba, had formerly been enslaved.
Fanny Matilda Eaton, unlike her mother
and grandmother, was of mixed race. She was
described as a mulatto — that is, half black and half
white — so her father may have been a white estate
owner or manager, or possibly a British soldier, James Entwistle or Antwistle,
Fanny’s original surname. He died in Jamaica aged only twenty, but perhaps
it was he who funded Matilda and their daughter’s voyage to London, for
somehow they found their way there in the 1840s. In London, they settled into
working-class life in St Pancras. Matilda, a laundress, later married, as did
Fanny, in 1857, aged twenty-two: her husband, James Eaton, nineteen, was a
hansom-cab driver, and they had ten children between 1858 and 1879.
Since she was sixteen, Fanny had worked as a charlady, or cleaner, but
she had another way of making money, a way that allowed her to sit quietly
for hours, away from the drudgery of her cleaning work and of running her
small, crowded home. Her thick, kinky hair and “exotic” mixed-race features
made her an irresistible model for artists, some of them still famous today as
members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As a result, her likeness hangs
today in the galleries at Tate Britain, in the British Museum, the Yale Centre
for British Art, and the Princeton Museum of Art, among others.
For Eaton was a favourite model among the artists who had been members
of the Brotherhood — and no wonder: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of its
leaders, described her in a letter to fellow artist Ford Madox Brown, written
when Eaton was thirty, as having “a very fine head and figure — a good deal
of Janey.” This was Janey Morris, the first, quintessential Pre-Raphaelite
“stunner.” Founded in 1848, the Brotherhood had an ideal that they sought out:
they had found her first in Jane Burden, who was tall, dark, and sturdy, with
a mass of curly hair, a firm jaw, strongly drawn brows, and bee-stung lips. At
nineteen, in 1859, she married the designer and writer William Morris, though
she and Rossetti later became lovers.
72 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM