September 5, 2024 • 25 mins
Black folks were in European paintings in the 19th and 20th centuries. A lot of the time, they were servants ... or shadows. Props in the background. But sometimes, they were the subject of portraits. Today, Katie and Yves go on a journey through a couple of these models' lives.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and fair Weather
Friends Media. You are right now, Katie is looking at
(00:26):
a painting. Katie, can you tell me what you see?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So there's a naked white woman on a bed, she
has her shoes on in the bed trifling, and there's
a black woman behind her who's fully closed and holding
a bouquet of flowers. The white woman's gaze is directly
at you, the person watching the painting, but the black
(00:50):
woman is looking at the white lady.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
So have you seen this painting before?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Okay, you've never seen this from.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Well, so you know it's Olympia and it's by the
French painter Edouard Money. And it's been a while, but
I have seen this painting in person. So I love
seeing paintings from all different periods and styles, including oil
paintings in the realist style like Olympia is. But when
there's a black person in an oil Europeans painting, then
(01:19):
I linger a little bit longer. When I'm in museums,
I wonder who they were. I wonder what the artist's
relationship with them was. I wonder if they were real
or imagined, or if the character is a composite person.
I wonder how black people lived in whatever setting they
were in.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, it makes sense to linger on those paintings a
little bit more because they're far less black people in
white Europeans paintings.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah. So like when they do show up, I got questions,
And a lot of times they are like just in
the background. They're basically shadows or servants. Sometimes there are
the subject of portraits, though they might look at you
longingly or thoughtfully, or with some expression that you just
can't put your finger on. But however they show up,
I wonder what their story is, who's the model for
(02:06):
the black person and the painting. Fortunately, plenty of folks
who do this kind of research for a living wanted
to go down that exact rabbit hole. So today we're
going on a little journey through these art models' lives
just to get to know a little more about a
few of the women who have gone unnamed on wall
text and overlooked in art scholarship. I'm Katie and I'm Eves,
(02:29):
and today we're training our eye on the Black muse.
The black woman that you described in that painting Olympia
is named Lore. She's tending to Olympia. In the painting,
Olympia is a sex worker. That's why she's nude on
the bed. Why she got shoes on the bed that
I don't know, no manner I mean also may have
(02:51):
something to do with class, like showing, oh, I can
you know? This is what I do in my bed.
I keep my shoes on. I always got to be prepared,
So I'm not sure about that. But lour is Olympia's servant,
and in the book Posing Modernity, the curator doctor Denise
Morrell points out how scholars really didn't talk about what
Laura's presence in the painting means. But Laura also shows
(03:14):
up in Maynee's eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty two
painting Children in the Tuilerie Gardens, and Laura is also
the subject of a portrait Maynee painted the same year
that he created Olympia. Katie here is Children in the
Tuilerie Gardens and the portrait of Lore. Do you notice
any differences between the two?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So in the gardens painting, she's off to the side,
like if you crop this, she would definitely get cut out,
and it seems like she's tending to some white child.
And then in the portrait you see her. She has
on nice clothes, little chain, little hair wrap, little ear rings.
You know, got a little mona. Lisa smiles moment going.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So what do you notice about the difference between Low
herself in the two images.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
In the Garden's image, her clothing is depicting that of
a servant. And also she has no face.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yes, so Children in the Tuilerie Gardens was painted before
the portrait. So as you mentioned, just now, Katie in Children,
she doesn't have a face. She has a head wrap on.
You can kind of see the abstracted forms of what
she's wearing all of the well, a lot of the
(04:35):
other people in the painting are like that as well.
When she's in this nature setting. But like you said,
she is kind of on the margins here, and in
the portrait she's right in the center. Her gaze is
off center, but she is the focus of the portrait.
So it's almost like from Children to the portrait, Lore
came to life. Manee wrote in his notebook that Laura
(04:58):
was a very beautiful black woman, but of course Lore
was more than just her appearance. Slavery was abolished in
French territories in eighteen forty eight. Now, look, that wasn't
the first time that slavery was abolished in the French territories,
and later on you'll hear me talk about it being
abolished at different times. But don't be confused. This is
(05:18):
one time that slavery was abolished in French territories and
because of that, the lore that's in these paintings was
a free black woman. She lived at eleven Rue Vontemiel
in Paris, not too far from Manet studio. There was
a small but growing community of free black folks in
her part of the city, which was on the north side.
And it's great that we know her name and where
(05:40):
she lived, but there isn't a lot of information about
her life outside of those details. But we do know
a little bit more about Fanny Eaton. More on this
muse after the break.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So Fanny Eaton, where would I have seen her?
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You might have seen her in paintings by Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti,
Rebecca Solomon, Simeon Solomon, and Johanna mary Wells. She was
the muse for a lot of pre Raphaelite artists. Here's
a side view of Fanny Katie shown in the painting
Head of a Mulatta Woman by Joanna mary Wells. How
does Fanny look to you? She cute?
Speaker 2 (06:25):
She cute. You know, she got a nice little shawl on,
a nice little I would say, see through shawl, nice
little pearl ear rings. You know, her gaze is like downcast.
Maybe she's very pensive in this moment, but you know
she's taking it.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, and the background of this is like pretty somber looking,
as like a gray greenish brown situation. But it doesn't
really come off as sad to me. It just comes
off as like a little ritzy. I think, you know,
the outfit she's wearing, it's giving chaffon or silk or
something like that. And yeah, she looks like she is
(07:05):
well off, she's well stationed in life. It's what she
looks like in this painting. So Fanny, though, was born
in Jamaica in eighteen thirty five, and her mother was
probably born in a slavery and her doubts probably a
white man, but there are a lot of questions around
her actual ancestry. But either way, Fanny and her mother
probably made their way to England in the eighteen forties
(07:27):
and by the time Fanny was sixteen, she was working
as a servant in London. She married a coach driver
named James Eaton, and the two of them had ten
children together over the course of twenty years. Ten kids.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
So she went from being a servant to having ten
kids to modeling.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, I have It's a path, isn't it. She started
working as a model at the Royal Academy of Arts,
which is an institution in London. I can say that
I don't know how she got that job and why
she chose it is pretty unclear, but what is clear
is that she had a bunch of kids, so I'm
sure the money that they needed to support them it
(08:07):
had to come from somewhere. I don't know how much
James Eaton was getting, but I would imagine for ten kids,
you know, she had them over time, so I'm sure
that the money that she got from her work as
a model was a great help to her family. So
the British artist Simeon Solomon was the first known artist
to draw studies of Fanny. Her first appearance as an
art model in public was in Simeon Solomon's painting The
(08:29):
Mother of Moses. In that painting debut in eighteen sixty
at a Royal Academy exhibition. But the whole thing about
Fanny and her being amused was that she had light
skin in this racial ambiguity, and that made her like
a good muse in the pre laphylite artist's eyes, because
that meant that she could portray a bunch of different
figures from the Bible, and that was a rare role
for black women in Victorian art. In that kind of art,
(08:52):
they weren't usually models that fit into white standards of beauty.
They were, you know, othered, and they were there for
decor ration, often for contrasts and for a scene setting.
In July of eighteen sixty, Fanny was paid fifteen shillings
each for three sittings that she did at the Royal Academy,
so you get an idea of how much she was
paid for her work. But she stopped modeling sometime in
(09:15):
the eighteen seventies, and nobody knows why, but one of
her daughters may have fallen in her footsteps and become
an art model. And at some point Fanny's husband died
and Fanny started working as a seamstress and moved to
the Isle of White to do domestic work for a family.
So as you can see, there are a lot of
(09:35):
gaps in her story, as there are for a lot
of black and mixed race women in the past. But
there is a little bit we know about her in
any amount, any measure that we can uncover. I think
it's worthwhile talking about.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, looking at her, I wouldn't think she was black.
But it's interesting too because I don't know how race
was perceived back then in that part of the world.
So do you think people saw her as a black woman,
as a mixed race? Was she like low key passing
in some of these modeling instances?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So I think people saw her as a black woman.
They saw her as having dark skin, So I know,
right the bar is somewhere, but yeah, they saw her
as dark skin. So I'm going to show you this
picture of Fanny Eaton, is a sketch of her that
looks a little different than the picture that we were
talking about just now, the portrait where she's got that
nice shawl on and the nice pearl earrings on. So
(10:28):
looking at this sketch of Fanny Eaton, what do you see?
And then after you tell me what you see, we'll
talk about if you feel any differently.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So in this picture she's also looking off to the side.
Her hair is more visible, like the texture of it,
more coarse. She still has on nice clothes and jewelry,
and her skin is still light in this picture. But yeah,
I can see her being racialized. It's on her hair.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. And I don't know how much maneuvering there really
was back then, as like in comparison to the kind
of colorism that we have today where we really be
breaking it down. But if I were to see the
portrait of Fanny eaton that side view ahead of a
Mulata woman, I wouldn't immediately say, oh, she's definitely black,
But once reading into it a little bit more, I
(11:16):
think I would say I would see like the hair
texture around the edges of her hair and think that
she was okay. But there were people, even the artists
who painted her, who kind of didn't really understand what
her racial mixture was either, because there was one of
the artists, Rosetti, who said to someone else that, oh,
(11:38):
she's not a Hindu, she's a Mulato. And in other
episodes of this podcast, we've kind of talked about how
black people did past and when the orientalism was jumping out.
Black people would pass for what they would call Hindus,
or they would say that they were Indian and things
like that. But we don't have any document of what
Fanny Eaton herself said or how she thought about her race.
(12:02):
There's a lot of information that's missing, and I don't
want to speculate around it, but there is no evidence
that I saw that she denied her race or anything
like that. So people would just say things about her
appearance and that how they liked it. Like somebody says
she had a very fine head and figure, which sounds
(12:23):
very objectifying, But I mean, I guess that's what you're
doing there, the object of your painting. Yeah, but I
do think that takes on another level when you're talking
about black people and that's what you're gazing at.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
And I guess if she was like the stand in
for all these other figures, like maybe she had their
proportions or something that fit well into what they're trying
to get.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, yeah, after the break, we have another black muse.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Stay tuned, So Fanny Eaton lore. There are a couple
of black muses whose stories we know a little bit about.
I imagine there are some that have been lost to time, though.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, there are plenty of unnamed black women in white artists'
nineteenth century paintings, and a lot of the time their
names remain buried. There are no records of who they were,
and anything that they may have written about their time
as models has disappeared or never existed in the first place.
And that was the case for this painting by Marie Guillamine.
Benoit ben Wah was a French neoclassical painter. In eighteen hundred,
(13:31):
she created portrait do negress Or, a portrait of a
black woman. Ben Wah never took note of her model's name. Katie,
tell me what you see in this portrait?
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So I see a black woman sitting down. She also
has on a head wrap, earrings, a white dress, and
one of her breasts are exposed.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And how do you feel when you're looking at her expression?
What do you feel like she's saying through her expression?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
I mean in the American context, but this is French.
But if I was looking at it and thinking she
was American, I think she would be saying something about
like servitude and like still being seen as an object
for like maybe like breastfeeding babies that aren't hers, but
trying to get up out of that situation and move
(14:17):
on to a different like station in life. That's what
I would think in my American centric.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in the painting,
she is wearing red, white, and blue, which, yes, from
an American perspective, I think of the American flag, but
in this case it has been perceived as a reference
to the French flag. So it may be a symbol
of the freedom that formerly enslaved people had in the country,
(14:42):
because slavery was abolished in French territories in seventeen ninety four.
Plus the French Revolution had just ended in seventeen ninety nine,
so this painting could have been a nod to liberty.
You were talking about it too, if you were looking
at it from an American perspective, because you know, we
still know around the time period this was slavery may
come up in our mind. She's not fully clothed, so
(15:05):
there is the idea of like moving on from liberty
or thinking about what ways you're confined in your life
if you're thinking about slavery. So even you, you know,
from an American perspective, in twenty twenty four. It made
that link between the two, and that is a perspective
that some people took on the meaning of this painting.
But in eighteen oh two, a Napoleon Bonaparte said, just kidding,
(15:26):
run that back, and he reinstated at slavery. So this
could also be perceived to be about slavery's return, because
this painting, to remind you was done in eighteen hundred,
so it was just two years later when slavery returned. So,
like you said, her breast is uncovered, and in eighteen
hundred this was considered pretty inappropriate. But Benoi I could
(15:48):
have done that as an allusion to how black folks
were inspected at slave markets. But either way, some critics
at the time were offended by her nudity. Some didn't
like how her skim, they didn't like that the image
had hints of eroticism. But folks weren't really worried about
who she was back in eighteen hundred. They were just
(16:10):
worried about the fact that she was black and how
that affected the art. One critic name Jean Baptiste Bouttard said,
whom can one trust in life after such horror? It
is a white and pretty hand which has created this blackness.
So he's talking about how offended he is by this painting.
(16:34):
There's like this contrast between the subject of purity and
liberty and the delicate nature of her draped clothing, and
that didn't go with the ways that white folks viewed
black skin as horrifying and ugly. So in this case,
her skin's pretty dark, so unlike Fanny Eaton, who was
light skinned, there is not really any ambiguity around what
(16:55):
her background is. So people were clearly jumping in on
that and the criticism that they had. They really couldn't
take the skin, the fact that her skin was dark.
They thought it was an affront to the whole artistic medium,
to the esthetic, to the industry, because this white woman
was painting this dark skin, especially within this context, and
(17:16):
it hazard to say somebody of her skin tone wouldn't
be considered a person who could go between different biblical
figures and create that ambiguity like Fanny Eaton would. So
if you had to guess, Katie, what do you think
this woman in the painting's name is?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I don't really know French names like that, so I'll
pick one that is not French. Okay, I will say Hagar, it.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Wasn't Hagar, good guess, but she no longer has to
be referred to in the title just as Negress, so
her name is Madeleine. Madeline might have been born into
slavery and Guadaloupe, and ben Wah's brother in law may
have brought her to France after that, and if she
went there as a slave or a servant, I'm not
(18:03):
fully sure. Maybe she was freed in seventeen ninety four
when slavery was abolished in French colonies. But as you
can see, there are a lot of maybes in the
story that we do know about Madeline. This painting of
her is in the Louverus collection and on the museum site,
the painting is actually titled Portrait June femme noir, not Negress.
(18:26):
It seems like negress and it was still kind of
a diminutive, derogatory term even in the French language. When
you go back and read old sources, even American ones,
and they're talking about black women, they often use the
term negress. In an American English context, I feel like
it can kind of sound a little bit more uppny, so,
(18:52):
but yeah, I think it is interesting though, to see
the people that we talked about today are just a
few of all of the muses, and there are so
many who weren't named. And of course there were muses,
there were a lot of them who were women, but
there were also people who were sitters for a lot
of portraits who were black men. And these kinds of
(19:16):
people have been the objects of artists I over the years.
It's interesting because you know, the word muse kind of
has this connotation of uplifting and there's someone who I admire,
there's someone who I have a lot of affection for potentially,
or that I have stuff to learn from it. It's really,
(19:36):
I feel like a glowing word. And these models were
the inspiration for the artists. But at the same time,
there was still a hierarchy, like there was still a
difference of authority between the artists and the sitter. They
are still the ones that are working for money. And
we talked about how Fanny Eaton looks pretty upstanding and
classy in her picture. She has on the per earrings
(20:00):
and she has on the iridescent shawl, and then also madeleine.
She is kind of draped in clothing that wouldn't necessarily
be working class. But these women were working class, like
ten children making fifteen shillings for three each for three sittings.
They had husbands, they had to go back home at
the end of the day. They changed their professions in
(20:23):
some cases because for what reasons we don't know, but
they were still inferior to the artists who were creating
the work and obviously to a lot of people who
were viewing the work. And I've seen some sources that
talk about Madeleines placed in the halls, all next to
all the other images, maybe on whatever floor it was
on in the Louvra and Madelines the only one with
(20:47):
dark skin, and definitely Scan that's that dark, So there
is this dark contrast. She immediately stands out. It's easy
to other.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, it's also like interesting to see how models are
different now, like as far as the stories they're telling.
I feel like models now aren't seen as inferior, especially
during like the supermodel age of like the nineties. I
feel like Madeline would have been that girl, like you
wouldn't have to go back home and work, and maybe
(21:18):
you take care of okays, maybe you have a nanny.
But it's interesting to see like how things are different,
and just like what it means to be a model,
and like what story you're telling through sitting there about yourself,
Like one is I'm working class and I need these shillings,
and the others I'm so beautiful and everyone should aspire
to look like me.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
So live model drawing was an important part of the
foundational practice of some of those bougie artists who were
in Europe who were going to places like the Royal Academy,
and it was what they had to take as part
of their course work. So it was a kind of
a mundane job as opposed to something that was more
uplifted because you had these people who were supposed to
(22:00):
be turning into great artists and you were just a
person who's coming in to be the vessel kind of
for this amazing and enlightening work that they were going
to do. So yeah, back then, definitely different. One parallel though,
or kind of similarity that I see specifically with Fanny
Eaton story, is thinking about her ambiguity and how much
(22:22):
in media today, like in commercials, a lot of the time,
people will tend to have someone they'll fill their color
quota by bringing someone in who's ambiguous. It seems like
a lot of companies like to do that because these
people can fill whatever role they need, but they can
also not hear any backlash because they're like, oh, I
got this poc in. Yeah, So that wasn't necessarily their
(22:47):
aim back then, but in a way, yeah, they didn't
care about that. It just fulfilled their goals of being
preaphytes and painting in the way that they did.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Do you know how they found out Madeline's name?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
I think it might have been doctor Denise Morrell who
dug that up, but I haven't seen the actual path
to how they found it, what they were digging through
to find her name. So I'm curious as to know
the answer to that question too, because that's always an
interesting part of the process. Maybe whatever they did to
find out what Madeleine's name was, people can use that
same course to find out what other art models' names
(23:22):
were in the past.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
And now it's time for role credits, the segment where
we give credit to a person, place, or thing that
we've encountered during the week. Eve who are what would
you like to give credit to?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I would like to give credit to snacking. It's not
something that I do often. I don't really keep a
lot of snacks around my house, but I feel like
I need to level my game up because every time
I do want to snag, even if it's not often,
I don't have one. So I'm going to give credit
to snacking.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Okay, I feel like our credits are polar opposites. Okay,
tell me, I want to give credit to fasting and
not like fasting as like dieting, just like fasting from
something that you know is distracting you. Sometimes it is
just like food, but you know it could be social media,
(24:12):
it could be cussing, It could be like a lot
of things that you fast from, but just like to
get some like clarity and clear your mind. So total
opposites kind of I think I could be. And thanks
for listening, Thank ye y'all.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Bye. On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather
Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves, Jeffco and
Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison.
Follow us on Instagram at on Theme Show. You can
also send us some email at Hello at on Theme
(24:50):
dot Show. Head to on Theme dot show to check
out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and fair Weather
Friends Media. You are right now, Katie is looking at
(00:26):
a painting. Katie, can you tell me what you see?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
So there's a naked white woman on a bed, she
has her shoes on in the bed trifling, and there's
a black woman behind her who's fully closed and holding
a bouquet of flowers. The white woman's gaze is directly
at you, the person watching the painting, but the black
(00:50):
woman is looking at the white lady.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
So have you seen this painting before?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Okay, you've never seen this from.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Well, so you know it's Olympia and it's by the
French painter Edouard Money. And it's been a while, but
I have seen this painting in person. So I love
seeing paintings from all different periods and styles, including oil
paintings in the realist style like Olympia is. But when
there's a black person in an oil Europeans painting, then
(01:19):
I linger a little bit longer. When I'm in museums,
I wonder who they were. I wonder what the artist's
relationship with them was. I wonder if they were real
or imagined, or if the character is a composite person.
I wonder how black people lived in whatever setting they
were in.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, it makes sense to linger on those paintings a
little bit more because they're far less black people in
white Europeans paintings.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah. So like when they do show up, I got questions,
And a lot of times they are like just in
the background. They're basically shadows or servants. Sometimes there are
the subject of portraits, though they might look at you
longingly or thoughtfully, or with some expression that you just
can't put your finger on. But however they show up,
I wonder what their story is, who's the model for
(02:06):
the black person and the painting. Fortunately, plenty of folks
who do this kind of research for a living wanted
to go down that exact rabbit hole. So today we're
going on a little journey through these art models' lives
just to get to know a little more about a
few of the women who have gone unnamed on wall
text and overlooked in art scholarship. I'm Katie and I'm Eves,
(02:29):
and today we're training our eye on the Black muse.
The black woman that you described in that painting Olympia
is named Lore. She's tending to Olympia. In the painting,
Olympia is a sex worker. That's why she's nude on
the bed. Why she got shoes on the bed that
I don't know, no manner I mean also may have
(02:51):
something to do with class, like showing, oh, I can
you know? This is what I do in my bed.
I keep my shoes on. I always got to be prepared,
So I'm not sure about that. But lour is Olympia's servant,
and in the book Posing Modernity, the curator doctor Denise
Morrell points out how scholars really didn't talk about what
Laura's presence in the painting means. But Laura also shows
(03:14):
up in Maynee's eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty two
painting Children in the Tuilerie Gardens, and Laura is also
the subject of a portrait Maynee painted the same year
that he created Olympia. Katie here is Children in the
Tuilerie Gardens and the portrait of Lore. Do you notice
any differences between the two?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So in the gardens painting, she's off to the side,
like if you crop this, she would definitely get cut out,
and it seems like she's tending to some white child.
And then in the portrait you see her. She has
on nice clothes, little chain, little hair wrap, little ear rings.
You know, got a little mona. Lisa smiles moment going.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So what do you notice about the difference between Low
herself in the two images.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
In the Garden's image, her clothing is depicting that of
a servant. And also she has no face.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yes, so Children in the Tuilerie Gardens was painted before
the portrait. So as you mentioned, just now, Katie in Children,
she doesn't have a face. She has a head wrap on.
You can kind of see the abstracted forms of what
she's wearing all of the well, a lot of the
(04:35):
other people in the painting are like that as well.
When she's in this nature setting. But like you said,
she is kind of on the margins here, and in
the portrait she's right in the center. Her gaze is
off center, but she is the focus of the portrait.
So it's almost like from Children to the portrait, Lore
came to life. Manee wrote in his notebook that Laura
(04:58):
was a very beautiful black woman, but of course Lore
was more than just her appearance. Slavery was abolished in
French territories in eighteen forty eight. Now, look, that wasn't
the first time that slavery was abolished in the French territories,
and later on you'll hear me talk about it being
abolished at different times. But don't be confused. This is
(05:18):
one time that slavery was abolished in French territories and
because of that, the lore that's in these paintings was
a free black woman. She lived at eleven Rue Vontemiel
in Paris, not too far from Manet studio. There was
a small but growing community of free black folks in
her part of the city, which was on the north side.
And it's great that we know her name and where
(05:40):
she lived, but there isn't a lot of information about
her life outside of those details. But we do know
a little bit more about Fanny Eaton. More on this
muse after the break.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So Fanny Eaton, where would I have seen her?
Speaker 1 (06:05):
You might have seen her in paintings by Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti,
Rebecca Solomon, Simeon Solomon, and Johanna mary Wells. She was
the muse for a lot of pre Raphaelite artists. Here's
a side view of Fanny Katie shown in the painting
Head of a Mulatta Woman by Joanna mary Wells. How
does Fanny look to you? She cute?
Speaker 2 (06:25):
She cute. You know, she got a nice little shawl on,
a nice little I would say, see through shawl, nice
little pearl ear rings. You know, her gaze is like downcast.
Maybe she's very pensive in this moment, but you know
she's taking it.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, and the background of this is like pretty somber looking,
as like a gray greenish brown situation. But it doesn't
really come off as sad to me. It just comes
off as like a little ritzy. I think, you know,
the outfit she's wearing, it's giving chaffon or silk or
something like that. And yeah, she looks like she is
(07:05):
well off, she's well stationed in life. It's what she
looks like in this painting. So Fanny, though, was born
in Jamaica in eighteen thirty five, and her mother was
probably born in a slavery and her doubts probably a
white man, but there are a lot of questions around
her actual ancestry. But either way, Fanny and her mother
probably made their way to England in the eighteen forties
(07:27):
and by the time Fanny was sixteen, she was working
as a servant in London. She married a coach driver
named James Eaton, and the two of them had ten
children together over the course of twenty years. Ten kids.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
So she went from being a servant to having ten
kids to modeling.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, I have It's a path, isn't it. She started
working as a model at the Royal Academy of Arts,
which is an institution in London. I can say that
I don't know how she got that job and why
she chose it is pretty unclear, but what is clear
is that she had a bunch of kids, so I'm
sure the money that they needed to support them it
(08:07):
had to come from somewhere. I don't know how much
James Eaton was getting, but I would imagine for ten kids,
you know, she had them over time, so I'm sure
that the money that she got from her work as
a model was a great help to her family. So
the British artist Simeon Solomon was the first known artist
to draw studies of Fanny. Her first appearance as an
art model in public was in Simeon Solomon's painting The
(08:29):
Mother of Moses. In that painting debut in eighteen sixty
at a Royal Academy exhibition. But the whole thing about
Fanny and her being amused was that she had light
skin in this racial ambiguity, and that made her like
a good muse in the pre laphylite artist's eyes, because
that meant that she could portray a bunch of different
figures from the Bible, and that was a rare role
for black women in Victorian art. In that kind of art,
(08:52):
they weren't usually models that fit into white standards of beauty.
They were, you know, othered, and they were there for
decor ration, often for contrasts and for a scene setting.
In July of eighteen sixty, Fanny was paid fifteen shillings
each for three sittings that she did at the Royal Academy,
so you get an idea of how much she was
paid for her work. But she stopped modeling sometime in
(09:15):
the eighteen seventies, and nobody knows why, but one of
her daughters may have fallen in her footsteps and become
an art model. And at some point Fanny's husband died
and Fanny started working as a seamstress and moved to
the Isle of White to do domestic work for a family.
So as you can see, there are a lot of
(09:35):
gaps in her story, as there are for a lot
of black and mixed race women in the past. But
there is a little bit we know about her in
any amount, any measure that we can uncover. I think
it's worthwhile talking about.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, looking at her, I wouldn't think she was black.
But it's interesting too because I don't know how race
was perceived back then in that part of the world.
So do you think people saw her as a black woman,
as a mixed race? Was she like low key passing
in some of these modeling instances?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So I think people saw her as a black woman.
They saw her as having dark skin, So I know,
right the bar is somewhere, but yeah, they saw her
as dark skin. So I'm going to show you this
picture of Fanny Eaton, is a sketch of her that
looks a little different than the picture that we were
talking about just now, the portrait where she's got that
nice shawl on and the nice pearl earrings on. So
(10:28):
looking at this sketch of Fanny Eaton, what do you see?
And then after you tell me what you see, we'll
talk about if you feel any differently.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So in this picture she's also looking off to the side.
Her hair is more visible, like the texture of it,
more coarse. She still has on nice clothes and jewelry,
and her skin is still light in this picture. But yeah,
I can see her being racialized. It's on her hair.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. And I don't know how much maneuvering there really
was back then, as like in comparison to the kind
of colorism that we have today where we really be
breaking it down. But if I were to see the
portrait of Fanny eaton that side view ahead of a
Mulata woman, I wouldn't immediately say, oh, she's definitely black,
But once reading into it a little bit more, I
(11:16):
think I would say I would see like the hair
texture around the edges of her hair and think that
she was okay. But there were people, even the artists
who painted her, who kind of didn't really understand what
her racial mixture was either, because there was one of
the artists, Rosetti, who said to someone else that, oh,
(11:38):
she's not a Hindu, she's a Mulato. And in other
episodes of this podcast, we've kind of talked about how
black people did past and when the orientalism was jumping out.
Black people would pass for what they would call Hindus,
or they would say that they were Indian and things
like that. But we don't have any document of what
Fanny Eaton herself said or how she thought about her race.
(12:02):
There's a lot of information that's missing, and I don't
want to speculate around it, but there is no evidence
that I saw that she denied her race or anything
like that. So people would just say things about her
appearance and that how they liked it. Like somebody says
she had a very fine head and figure, which sounds
(12:23):
very objectifying, But I mean, I guess that's what you're
doing there, the object of your painting. Yeah, but I
do think that takes on another level when you're talking
about black people and that's what you're gazing at.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
And I guess if she was like the stand in
for all these other figures, like maybe she had their
proportions or something that fit well into what they're trying
to get.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, yeah, after the break, we have another black muse.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Stay tuned, So Fanny Eaton lore. There are a couple
of black muses whose stories we know a little bit about.
I imagine there are some that have been lost to time, though.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, there are plenty of unnamed black women in white artists'
nineteenth century paintings, and a lot of the time their
names remain buried. There are no records of who they were,
and anything that they may have written about their time
as models has disappeared or never existed in the first place.
And that was the case for this painting by Marie Guillamine.
Benoit ben Wah was a French neoclassical painter. In eighteen hundred,
(13:31):
she created portrait do negress Or, a portrait of a
black woman. Ben Wah never took note of her model's name. Katie,
tell me what you see in this portrait?
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So I see a black woman sitting down. She also
has on a head wrap, earrings, a white dress, and
one of her breasts are exposed.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And how do you feel when you're looking at her expression?
What do you feel like she's saying through her expression?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
I mean in the American context, but this is French.
But if I was looking at it and thinking she
was American, I think she would be saying something about
like servitude and like still being seen as an object
for like maybe like breastfeeding babies that aren't hers, but
trying to get up out of that situation and move
(14:17):
on to a different like station in life. That's what
I would think in my American centric.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in the painting,
she is wearing red, white, and blue, which, yes, from
an American perspective, I think of the American flag, but
in this case it has been perceived as a reference
to the French flag. So it may be a symbol
of the freedom that formerly enslaved people had in the country,
(14:42):
because slavery was abolished in French territories in seventeen ninety four.
Plus the French Revolution had just ended in seventeen ninety nine,
so this painting could have been a nod to liberty.
You were talking about it too, if you were looking
at it from an American perspective, because you know, we
still know around the time period this was slavery may
come up in our mind. She's not fully clothed, so
(15:05):
there is the idea of like moving on from liberty
or thinking about what ways you're confined in your life
if you're thinking about slavery. So even you, you know,
from an American perspective, in twenty twenty four. It made
that link between the two, and that is a perspective
that some people took on the meaning of this painting.
But in eighteen oh two, a Napoleon Bonaparte said, just kidding,
(15:26):
run that back, and he reinstated at slavery. So this
could also be perceived to be about slavery's return, because
this painting, to remind you was done in eighteen hundred,
so it was just two years later when slavery returned. So,
like you said, her breast is uncovered, and in eighteen
hundred this was considered pretty inappropriate. But Benoi I could
(15:48):
have done that as an allusion to how black folks
were inspected at slave markets. But either way, some critics
at the time were offended by her nudity. Some didn't
like how her skim, they didn't like that the image
had hints of eroticism. But folks weren't really worried about
who she was back in eighteen hundred. They were just
(16:10):
worried about the fact that she was black and how
that affected the art. One critic name Jean Baptiste Bouttard said,
whom can one trust in life after such horror? It
is a white and pretty hand which has created this blackness.
So he's talking about how offended he is by this painting.
(16:34):
There's like this contrast between the subject of purity and
liberty and the delicate nature of her draped clothing, and
that didn't go with the ways that white folks viewed
black skin as horrifying and ugly. So in this case,
her skin's pretty dark, so unlike Fanny Eaton, who was
light skinned, there is not really any ambiguity around what
(16:55):
her background is. So people were clearly jumping in on
that and the criticism that they had. They really couldn't
take the skin, the fact that her skin was dark.
They thought it was an affront to the whole artistic medium,
to the esthetic, to the industry, because this white woman
was painting this dark skin, especially within this context, and
(17:16):
it hazard to say somebody of her skin tone wouldn't
be considered a person who could go between different biblical
figures and create that ambiguity like Fanny Eaton would. So
if you had to guess, Katie, what do you think
this woman in the painting's name is?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I don't really know French names like that, so I'll
pick one that is not French. Okay, I will say Hagar, it.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Wasn't Hagar, good guess, but she no longer has to
be referred to in the title just as Negress, so
her name is Madeleine. Madeline might have been born into
slavery and Guadaloupe, and ben Wah's brother in law may
have brought her to France after that, and if she
went there as a slave or a servant, I'm not
(18:03):
fully sure. Maybe she was freed in seventeen ninety four
when slavery was abolished in French colonies. But as you
can see, there are a lot of maybes in the
story that we do know about Madeline. This painting of
her is in the Louverus collection and on the museum site,
the painting is actually titled Portrait June femme noir, not Negress.
(18:26):
It seems like negress and it was still kind of
a diminutive, derogatory term even in the French language. When
you go back and read old sources, even American ones,
and they're talking about black women, they often use the
term negress. In an American English context, I feel like
it can kind of sound a little bit more uppny, so,
(18:52):
but yeah, I think it is interesting though, to see
the people that we talked about today are just a
few of all of the muses, and there are so
many who weren't named. And of course there were muses,
there were a lot of them who were women, but
there were also people who were sitters for a lot
of portraits who were black men. And these kinds of
(19:16):
people have been the objects of artists I over the years.
It's interesting because you know, the word muse kind of
has this connotation of uplifting and there's someone who I admire,
there's someone who I have a lot of affection for potentially,
or that I have stuff to learn from it. It's really,
(19:36):
I feel like a glowing word. And these models were
the inspiration for the artists. But at the same time,
there was still a hierarchy, like there was still a
difference of authority between the artists and the sitter. They
are still the ones that are working for money. And
we talked about how Fanny Eaton looks pretty upstanding and
classy in her picture. She has on the per earrings
(20:00):
and she has on the iridescent shawl, and then also madeleine.
She is kind of draped in clothing that wouldn't necessarily
be working class. But these women were working class, like
ten children making fifteen shillings for three each for three sittings.
They had husbands, they had to go back home at
the end of the day. They changed their professions in
(20:23):
some cases because for what reasons we don't know, but
they were still inferior to the artists who were creating
the work and obviously to a lot of people who
were viewing the work. And I've seen some sources that
talk about Madeleines placed in the halls, all next to
all the other images, maybe on whatever floor it was
on in the Louvra and Madelines the only one with
(20:47):
dark skin, and definitely Scan that's that dark, So there
is this dark contrast. She immediately stands out. It's easy
to other.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, it's also like interesting to see how models are
different now, like as far as the stories they're telling.
I feel like models now aren't seen as inferior, especially
during like the supermodel age of like the nineties. I
feel like Madeline would have been that girl, like you
wouldn't have to go back home and work, and maybe
(21:18):
you take care of okays, maybe you have a nanny.
But it's interesting to see like how things are different,
and just like what it means to be a model,
and like what story you're telling through sitting there about yourself,
Like one is I'm working class and I need these shillings,
and the others I'm so beautiful and everyone should aspire
to look like me.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
So live model drawing was an important part of the
foundational practice of some of those bougie artists who were
in Europe who were going to places like the Royal Academy,
and it was what they had to take as part
of their course work. So it was a kind of
a mundane job as opposed to something that was more
uplifted because you had these people who were supposed to
(22:00):
be turning into great artists and you were just a
person who's coming in to be the vessel kind of
for this amazing and enlightening work that they were going
to do. So yeah, back then, definitely different. One parallel though,
or kind of similarity that I see specifically with Fanny
Eaton story, is thinking about her ambiguity and how much
(22:22):
in media today, like in commercials, a lot of the time,
people will tend to have someone they'll fill their color
quota by bringing someone in who's ambiguous. It seems like
a lot of companies like to do that because these
people can fill whatever role they need, but they can
also not hear any backlash because they're like, oh, I
got this poc in. Yeah, So that wasn't necessarily their
(22:47):
aim back then, but in a way, yeah, they didn't
care about that. It just fulfilled their goals of being
preaphytes and painting in the way that they did.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Do you know how they found out Madeline's name?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
I think it might have been doctor Denise Morrell who
dug that up, but I haven't seen the actual path
to how they found it, what they were digging through
to find her name. So I'm curious as to know
the answer to that question too, because that's always an
interesting part of the process. Maybe whatever they did to
find out what Madeleine's name was, people can use that
same course to find out what other art models' names
(23:22):
were in the past.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
And now it's time for role credits, the segment where
we give credit to a person, place, or thing that
we've encountered during the week. Eve who are what would
you like to give credit to?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I would like to give credit to snacking. It's not
something that I do often. I don't really keep a
lot of snacks around my house, but I feel like
I need to level my game up because every time
I do want to snag, even if it's not often,
I don't have one. So I'm going to give credit
to snacking.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Okay, I feel like our credits are polar opposites. Okay,
tell me, I want to give credit to fasting and
not like fasting as like dieting, just like fasting from
something that you know is distracting you. Sometimes it is
just like food, but you know it could be social media,
(24:12):
it could be cussing, It could be like a lot
of things that you fast from, but just like to
get some like clarity and clear your mind. So total
opposites kind of I think I could be. And thanks
for listening, Thank ye y'all.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Bye. On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather
Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves, Jeffco and
Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison.
Follow us on Instagram at on Theme Show. You can
also send us some email at Hello at on Theme
(24:50):
dot Show. Head to on Theme dot show to check
out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
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