1. Fanny Eaton was a Jamaican-born artist's model and domestic worker.
12 Facts About Fanny Eaton
1. 2.
Fanny Eaton is best known as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle in England between 1859 and 1867.
3.
Fanny Eaton was featured in works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Joanna Mary Boyce, Rebecca Solomon, and others.
4.
In 1857 she married James Fanny Eaton, a horse-cab proprietor and driver, who was born on 17 February 1838 in Shoreditch.
5.
In 1865, Dante Gabriel Rossetti employed Fanny Eaton to pose for the figure of one of the bridesmaids in his painting The Beloved.
6.
Fanny Eaton modelled for other artists in the Solomons circle of friends, including William Blake Richmond and Albert Joseph Moore.
7.
Fanny Eaton appears in a black chalk drawing by Rossetti, now in the Cantor Arts Centre at Stanford University in California.
8.
The painting Jephthah by John Everett Millais shows Fanny Eaton standing in the upper right-hand side of the canvas.
9.
Fanny Eaton is buried in Margravine Road Cemetery in Hammersmith.
10.
The "mesmerising" Fanny Eaton paintings were accorded a prominent place, with Albert Joseph Moore's Mother of Sisera and Rossetti's The Beloved on display.
11.
Exciting new depictions of the Jamaican-born woman have been uncovered, and catalogued, over the past decades, but Fanny Eaton herself is not known to have left letters or writing behind, and there are no known contemporary accounts of her opinions or conversations.
12.
Many of her biographies make statements along the following lines: "her decision to model was driven by the need to support her family," While this seems likely, in actuality, Fanny Eaton's motivations remain unknown.