Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

For Rossetti to have likened Fanny Eaton to
Morris shows that Fanny too must have been
thought a considerable beauty among the group.
Eaton’s fine but strong features, thick, massy
curls, and her grave, sometimes even careworn
expression fitted in perfectly with the Pre-
Raphaelite type (though her air of melancholy may
have been due to the preferred mood of the artists
as much as to her everyday life as the workingclass
mother of ten.) Many images of Eaton show
a resemblance to Jane, and in them she wears her
hair drawn low over her forehead, as they liked to
portray the latter.
Certainly they painted and drew Eaton often
enough. Yet a blog post about Eaton written in 2012
described her as “the forgotten stunner,” and there
have been suggestions that she has been sidelined
owing to her race. But that didn’t stop her being
painted in the first place, or from being included
in some of the best-known and the most beautiful
paintings and drawings of the period. The Pre-
Raphaelites, like many artists, were not confined
by many social conventions: class, religion, and
ethnic differences meant little to them. (Rossetti
himself was the child of Italian immigrants, and
lived out of wedlock with the model and artist
Lizzie Siddal for years.) The Pre-Raphaelites have
also fallen from favour in recent decades, after a
revival in the 1970s, but interest in them is now
growing again among art historians. More portraits
of Fanny Eaton are being discovered, acquired,
admired, and written about, along with details of
her life, thanks to the growing recognition that she
was one of their important models.
Another reason Eaton may have previously been less well known than
other Pre-Raphaelite muses was that she was not, as far as is known,
romantically involved with any of the artists, or caught up in any
of the ensuing scandals. The copper-haired Siddal, for instance — an artist
herself, whose patron was the critic John Ruskin — is best known for catching
pneumonia while posing as the drowned Ophelia for John Everett Millais in
1852. She may have suffered from tuberculosis, and died — of an overdose of
laudanum, possibly intentional — in 1862. Rossetti, who had eventually married
her in 1860 after a long, tempestuous relationship, famously exhumed her to
retrieve a book of unpublished poems he had buried with her. Fanny Eaton
featured in no such outlandish incidents.
During her engagement, Janey Burden, the daughter of a stableman and
a domestic servant, was hastily educated to be a suitable wife for Morris, a
gentleman — they had met while he was at university in Oxford. Other models
were less fortunate. Eaton went from being charlady to dressmaker. Other
Pre-Raphaelite muses were working-class too — Siddal began as a milliner’s
assistant — and worked as models to supplement their income. Some were
actresses or prostitutes; some were gypsies. So class was no deterrent when
it came to the Pre-Raphaelites’ choice of models. But although Eaton could
sit for the painters, she would not have had the time, even if she wanted, to
socialise or dally romantically with them. By the time she began modeling, she
was already married and a mother.
Class was no deterrent
when it came to the Pre-
Raphaelites’ choice of
models. But although
Eaton could sit for the
painters, she would
not have had the time
to socialise or dally
romantically with them
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