Fanny Eaton: Who was Pre-Raphaelite artists’s model in today’s Google Doodle?

Model featured in prominent works by Pre-Raphaelite artists

Pre-Raphaelite model Fanny Eaton is being celebrated with a Google Doodle today (Wednesday 18 November).

The Jamaican-born daughter of Matilda Foster – a former slave – and, most likely, a white plantation owner, was one of the most influential muses in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and helped to challenge idealised standards of beauty in Victorian society.

Eaton, born in 1835, arrived in London from Jamaica with her mother when she was a child, shortly after slavery was abolished in British colonies.

By 1851, she was recorded as living in London and working as a domestic servant.

During her twenties, she modelled for portrait painters at the Royal Academy of London, and caught the attention of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

She made her public debut in Simeon Solomon’s The Mother of Moses, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860.

For the next decade, Eaton modelled for and was featured in the works of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Rebecca Solomon, and Albert Moore.

She appears as one of the bridesmaids in Rossetti’s work, The Beloved. 

Jephthah, an 1867 painting by Millais, is believed to be the final work she featured in.

She married James Eaton, a horse-cab driver, in 1857. They had 10 children together.

Eaton was featured prominently in an exhibit last year on The Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.