#fanny eaton

[hidekomoon]

i finished the first 3 last spring and then completely gave up on this project until i completed number 4 & 5 this week. i’m kind of running out of paintings with easy poses to photoshop together but i’m gonna keep looking! (here’s my little collection of lesbian montages)

1. Evelyn de Morgan’s The Prisoner (1907-08) with Joanna Mary Boyce’s portrait of Fanny Eaton (1859)

2. Waterhouse’s The Awakening of Adonis (c.1900) and John Simmons’s Titania Sleeping in the Moonlight Protected by her Fairies

3. Portrait of a Lady by Natale Schiavoni (c.1820) with Nathaniel Sichel’s In the Time of Roses

4. A painting by Eugene de Blaas and L’Espoir by Auguste Leroux

5. La Blanche et la Noire by Félix Valloton (1913) with Portrait of Madeleine by Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1800)

[sankofaspirit]

Fanny Eaton (1835–1924) was a prominent British artist's model of Jamaican descent whose striking features embodied the ideals of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. Born as Fanny Matilda Antwistle in Jamaica, she moved to England as a child and later became a muse for numerous artists in the mid-19th century. She posed for renowned painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Joanna Boyce, often portraying biblical, mythological, or exoticized figures in their works.

Eaton's modelling career, spanning the 1850s and 1860s, coincided with the height of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's influence. Her presence in their art highlighted the movement's interest in diverse and unconventional beauty, setting her apart in an era of predominantly white subjects. Beyond her modelling, she lived a humble life, working as a domestic servant to support her family after her husband's death in 1881.

Fanny Eaton passed away on March 4, 1924, at the age of 88, in Acton, London. Though she died in relative obscurity, her legacy has been rediscovered in recent years, celebrated as a symbol of diversity and an essential contributor to 19th-century British art. 🇯🇲

[eucanthos]

Frederick Sandys (UK, Norwich, 1829 - 1904)

Antonio Frederick Augustus Sands

Eaton's portrait as a Study for the Head of Morgan le Fay, 1862, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Img from jeannepompadour original post

Fanny Eaton (1835–1924), a Jamaican-born woman who came to London as an infant – shortly after the abolition of slavery in British colonies.

For the artists affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Eaton's beauty was virtually unparalleled.

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/fanny-eaton-jamaican-pre-raphaelite-muse

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Fanny Eaton (1835-1924) was the daughter of a slave, born just after the abolition of slavery and brought to England by her mother. Fanny had two children and worked as a domestic servant and as an artist's model at the Royal Academy of Arts. Simeon Solomon featured Eaton in his painting, The Mother of Moses, and she was a favourite subject for the Pre-Raphaelite artists. This chalk drawing is by Walter Fryer Stocks c.1859.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[spiritsdancinginthenight]

Study of Fanny Eaton (1835-1924), by Joanna Boyce Wells (1831-1861) 1859.

[introvert-in-hiding]

A few of them were also artists of their own.

[agarcil]

Simeon Solomon

Fanny Eaton (1835–1924) Simeon Solomon (1840–1905) The Fitzwilliam Museum

[marzipanandminutiae]

Madame Marzi I must defer to ur wisdom

Recently you rb’d a painting with some younger ladies and in the tags talked a bit about short hair in Victorian Times

Do you have any reference for how shorter hair was styled at the time? I’ve seen plenty of paintings and such with VERY short hair (post illness or perhaps childbirth) where all you can really do is smooth it back, but what about that awkward, past the shoulders sort of stage where it’s too long to just brush back but too short to do much to? Surely they had some styling guides..?

(Also, a side question— how old would one be before going from shorter skirts to adult/full length ones?)

The two little girls in the garden (probably preteens-young teens)? Yes, I did!

It's hard to find images of women with in-between hair lengths, and I'm not sure why. Possibly because they'd find ways to put it up with false hair, whereas hair too short to put up is more obvious in photos. This could also have to do with the type of woman who has pixie- or bob-length hair voluntarily vs. mid-length: the latter is more likely to be attempting a grow-out, and thus to try her darndest to do The Culturally Accepted Long Hair StylesTM where a lady who chose a much shorter look wouldn't care. If that makes sense? Because, indeed, some of the women with very short hair were not ill or postpartum: ladies could, and did, choose to eschew long locks back then. It wasn't very common, but it happened.

(Nicole Rudolph has an excellent video about localized short hair trends for ladies during the Victorian era.)

You see a lot of these bob-type looks in photographs where the hair is center-parted and either naturally curly or curled on purpose, around the mid-19th century:

(1850s or 60s)

(Author, feminist, and abolitionist Anna Elizabeth Dickinson- no relation to Emily that I know of, though Anna was also a queer female writer around the same era -c. 1860s. She wore her hair short all her life, so it was voluntary in this case.)

(Also 1860s.)

Pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton frequently appears to have chin-to-shoulder length hair, though given that she was Black with a corresponding hair texture, it's hard to tell what the actual length is- it may be long and looped up in the 1850s-60s styles popular when she was most commonly painted (most free Black women in England and the US wore styles also popular with white women, to the best of their abilities given that fashion plates assumed European-textured hair as the "norm"):

(Fanny Eaton, 1861. Also worth noting that we have no images of what her hair looked like when she wasn't posing for fantastical paintings.)

I've never actually seen an image of a Victorian woman with mid-length hair outside the context of theatrical or artistic images from the end of the century, now I think of it. Huh. It's a mystery, I suppose!

As for skirts, while in earlier periods children had basically worn miniature adult clothing, it became fashionable around the 1830s-40s to dress girls in short skirts and boys in short pants. The usual rule was knee-length until around age 10, then mid-calf-length until somewhere between 16 and 18 when skirts would be "let down" and the girl would start wearing her hair up, becoming a young adult in the eyes of society. (Contrary to popular belief, this had nothing to do with marriage- while you were theoretically eligible for it when you started dressing as an adult, girls/women younger than 20 were still often considered a bit too immature to marry. It wasn't forbidden, but many people thought it unwise. And yes, unmarried young women did still wear their hair up and their skirts long.)

...unless she preferred her hair short, which as you can see, was an option!

[artandthebible]

The Mother of Moses

Artist: Simeon Solomon (British, 1840–1905

Date: 1860

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware, United States

Description

Moses's mother Jochabed is seen here holding her infant, the baby Moses, before consigning him to the river Nile in the wicker basket, which the baby's elder sister, Miriam, has under her arm. Jochabed has kept the child hidden but now accepts that she must act more drastically if he is to escape the Pharoah's edict that baby boys should be taken from their families and drowned: "when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink" (Exodus 2,3).

Solomon has tried to present the heart-breaking moment with Pre-Raphaelite accuracy. This included using the Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton as his model — the baby and the girl are likely to have been her own children.

[writing-for-life]

Mrs Eaton—Dante Gabriel Rossetti

[tri-ciclo]

Joanna Boyce Wells Study of Fanny Eaton, 1861. Oil on paper laid to linen

[ilookattextile]

Simeon Solomon, The Mother of Moses (1860), and studies of Fanny Eaton (1859) for Yocheved and Miriam

Screencaps or Yocheved and Miriam from Prince of Egypt (1998)

[mermaidsirennikita]

i feel like i'm missing something i get why margot is a bad choice but how does an actor have "gothic" vibes? is this like a period drama face thing

I suppose it's similar, but there's definitely an aesthetic that comes with gothic romance. I would recommend looking up paintings like "Emma Hart as Circe" (this was used as the WH cover in some mass market editions) and the Pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti, Waterhouse, models like Fanny Eaton and Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris.

There's an aesthetic that to me looks less carved and chiseled and more lush and "melting into nature" associated with Romanticism (which, in a work like Wuthering Heights, makes Catherine's withering away all the more stark). WH is a work that is inherently aligned with nature, because it's Gothic and it's Romantic.

Again, would never say that Margot isn't beautiful, but I think that a lot of people understandably have more of an idea of that sort of untamed, wild-haired, full-faced, sort of untouched beauty turned fallen woman with Cathy.

FWIW, in her Borgias days especially I think Holliday Grainger also would've been a great match for this type of role, for similar reasons. There's something a lot less chiseled to her look, and this isn't to say that someone like Margot can't be in a period piece (I mean, Keira K has a chiseled~ face and was a period piece queen) but for Cathy I wouldn't choose someone who looks so polished.

[page-28]

Fanny Eaton-Antwistle the first Jamaican supermodel of Notting Hill, who came to Britain in the 1840s, married James Eaton and lived at 191 Lancaster Road in the 1860s-70s. She modelled at the Royal Academy and became closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. She features in paintings by Everett Millais, Frederick Sandys and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Sourced by David Fitzgerald from https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/.../unforgotten-lives...

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/.../unforgotten-lives

[valkyries-things]

FANNY EATON // ARTIST MODEL

“She was a Jamaican-born artist’s model and domestic worker. She is best known as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle in England between 1859 and 1867. Her public debut was in Simeon Solomon’s painting The Mother of Moses, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860. She was also featured in works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Joanna Mary Boyce, Rebecca Solomon, and others.”