Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

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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
Mrs Fanny Eaton (c.1859; chalk on paper), by Walter Fryer Stocks WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 73
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January/February 2017 FREE take-hom
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Contents No. 143 January/February 2
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January/February 2017 Cover A young
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CARIBBEAN AIRLINES AT 10 A decade o
Page 24 and 25: Powered by people As head of corpor
Page 27 and 28: datebook Your guide to Caribbean ev
Page 29 and 30: Crafted Richer. Aged Deeper. theeld
Page 31 and 32: St Barth Fun Cup St Jean Beach, Sai
Page 33 and 34: Holetown Festival St James, Barbado
Page 36 and 37: Illustration by James Hackett It’
Page 38: the look Wood for life Jamaican fur
Page 41: Blind cricket was first played in 1
Page 45 and 46: No Safeguards, by H. Nigel Thomas (
Page 47 and 48: Single Spotlight What Can We Do Aga
Page 49 and 50: immerse edison boodoosingh 49 Snaps
Page 51 and 52: Carnival is mine There are as many
Page 53 and 54: At twenty-five years old, Khari Cod
Page 56 and 57: Before sunrise In the darkness befo
Page 58 and 59: “I never choose the mas” Tracy
Page 60: maria nunes I never choose the mas.
Page 63 and 64: “My Carnival no longer starts or
Page 65 and 66: ADVERTISEMENT
Page 67 and 68: Music in motion The steelpan is Tri
Page 69 and 70: Ad.pdf 1 12/7/16 12:13 PM SHIPPING
Page 71 and 72: Hayley Madden for The Poetry Societ
Page 73: months, this is not just a shutting
Page 77 and 78: Fanny Eaton’s thick, kinky hair a
Page 79 and 80: ARRIVE PHB.cz (Richard Semik) / shu
Page 81 and 82: The serene bay at the fishing villa
Page 84 and 85: Under the water Altin Osmanaj / shu
Page 86 and 87: Martin Mecnarowski / shutterstock.c
Page 88: Fort King George is one of the best
Page 91 and 92: Streetscape French Creole influence
Page 93 and 94: ROUND TRIP T photography / Shutters
Page 96: MIC DAX Mindelo, Cape Verde Off the
Page 100 and 101: 98 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM Binche, B
Page 102 and 103: 100 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM Cape Tow
Page 104: gary yim / Shutterstock.com Oruro,
Page 108 and 109: LAYOVER Eric Baker / shutterstock.c
Page 110 and 111: THE DEAL Electric avenues Around th
Page 112 and 113: on this day The remains of the Dane
Page 114 and 115: puzzles Puzzle grid.pdf 1 11/15/16
Page 116 and 117: 81% (2016 year-to-date: 7 December)
Page 119: 737 onboard Entertainment — JANUA
Page 122: parting shot This old house One of
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Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

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