Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

Fanny Eaton’s 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
Opposite page The Mother of Moses (1860;
oil on canvas), by Simeon Solomon
Right Head of Mrs Eaton (1861; oil on paper
laid to linen), by Joanna Boyce Wells
Women are hugely important in the
Pre-Raphaelite oeuvre, and not merely
as muses: they are often at the heart of
paintings, stately, statuesque, unsmiling,
mysterious, mystical. For these artists,
a woman of another race, or, more
intriguing still, a mixture of races, might
have possessed these alluring qualities even more
abundantly; and as much as any of their other
models, Eaton symbolised the ideal of female
beauty and fascination. They were preoccupied
with “the Other,” depicting familiar scenes from
unexpected angles and featuring characters rarely
focused on.
The Pre-Raphaelites also combined visual
realism with a nostalgia for medieval painting and
literature, and painted many biblical stories and
archaic and classical myths; hence the women in
them were often ethnically ambiguous (in his letter
about Eaton, Rossetti explained that she was “not
Hindoo . . . but mulatto”). So for them Eaton’s racial
mixture may well have been an added attraction.
Among their other models and muses were the
Greek painter Maria Zambaco, lover of Edward
Burne-Jones, and Keomi Gray, the gypsy mistress
of Frederick Sandys. The latter is said to have
used Fanny as the original model for his Morgan
Le Fay — evil enchantress and half-sister of King Arthur — but eventually
replaced her head with Gray’s. The Pre-Raphaelites also used Eaton in Arabic
and biblical scenes. Like other artists of the era, they sometimes also painted
people with traditionally African looks: black people figure widely in their
paintings, as in other Victorian art, sometimes chosen in order to stand out,
sometimes blending into a crowd scene. The Pre-Raphaelites differ, however,
in also using non-white models like Eaton to depict figures of ideal beauty.
The first known sketches featuring Fanny were made in 1859, by Simeon
Solomon, already noted for his draughtsmanship at nineteen. He may have
met Eaton by chance, as he lived not far from her. Sometimes he even used her
as a model while changing her gender in his drawings. He made pencil studies
of her as the basis for a painting of Moses’ mother, shown at the 1860 Royal
Academy Exhibition. Thus, as well as finished paintings, there are also many
drawings of Fanny, often with her hair unbound and realistically textured.
The portrayal of her as Moses’ mother is especially interesting because of its
reference to slavery, with a mixed-race West Indian depicted as an Israelite
woman enslaved in Egypt.
Solomon’s sister Rebecca, by contrast, painted Eaton as an Indian ayah
in A Young Teacher, in which the nursemaid is being “taught” by the child she
looks after (an innocent-seeming painting which nevertheless seems to take
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