In Victorian England, the ideal woman was one of porcelain complexion, modest temperament and who was the subject of a wealthy family. This was a time where the British empire subjugated much of the globe and where the sun of British values - colonialism, racism, and extractivism - never slept. It was here where Fanny Eaton, a Black Jamaican woman, became Britain’s first supermodel.

Fanny Eaton was born Fanny Antwhistle or Entwhistle in Jamaica in 1835, a year after emancipation was granted. She grew up with her mother, Matilda Foster, an ex-enslaved person and an unknown - probably illegitimate - father who was likely a slave master. Fanny moved to London sometime in the 1840s with her mother, who became a domestic servant. In 1957, Fanny married James Eaton, a (white) horse-cab proprietor and driver (with whom she had ten children). Fanny was part of the working-class, taking jobs as a cleaner to support her new family. However, this was not enough, so she took art-modelling jobs on the side.

"Eaton’s presence within British creative culture was a rebellion in itself"

She became a life model for the Royal Academy of Art and soon became a muse for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of white male artists - including painters, poets and art critics - who revolted against the way that they felt that art had been influenced by certain Renaissance painters, such as Raphael. They argued that art had lost its beauty, its detail, its bright colours, in favour of what they believed to be an unrealistic and unimaginative depiction of reality. At a time where political rebellions were taking place worldwide, the Brotherhood fought against the dominant form of art. The movement was a massive influence on the development of art in Europe at the time.

Eaton’s presence within British creative culture was a rebellion in itself. Her so-called “mulatto” features (a derogatory word used at the time to describe people with one white and one Black parent) directly subverted the typical image of beauty. This was a time where any person who was born from African blood was denounced to the realm of beast, their features ugly and their temperament animalistic - characteristics that were birthed from categorisations during slavery to separate the pure from the evil, the beautiful from the ghastly, and the white from the Black.

A key example of this can be seen through one of the most popular novels in Victorian England, Jane Eyre. The author Charlotte Bronte paints a portrait of life for Victorian (white middle-class) women through binary opposites. In the book, the main character, Jane, is juxtaposed with her alter-ego and lover’s wife, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, a creole woman from Jamaica. Bertha is described in the following extract:

“What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.”

Afro-textured hair is something that has been, and still is, demonised in Western society, with long straight hair being a symbol of femininity. Hair has been used as a tool to subjugate Black women, who often have to cover their natural tresses to seem “presentable” or “professional” or “civilised.” In the essay “Black Is a Woman’s Color”, bell hooks comments on white beauty standards by using hair as an example:

“Good hair is hair that is not kinky, hair that does not feel like balls of steel, wool, hair that does not take hours to comb, hair that does not need tons of grease to untangle, hair that is long. Real good hair is straight hair, hair like white folks’ hair.”

Images of Eaton with her kinky hair texture clearly and probably present were sent out to high society, working to visibilise and, subsequently, beautify Black womanhood. Having said that, we must remain cognizant of the colourism, featurism, and even texturism at play in the idolisation of Fanny Eaton as a symbol of Black beauty from the past. Black women with a more Afrocentric phenotype have also occupied space in Britain, going as far back as the Tudors (in terms of clear documentation). Sara Forbes Bonetta is a name that springs to mind when considering such. Born into a royal Yoruba dynasty, she was enslaved during a regional war, then released by Captain Frederick E. Forbes, who brought her to England aged five. She, subsequently, became Queen Victoria’s Goddaughter and so existed within the same period as Eaton but in a different class stratum. Indeed, it’s essential we memorialise them in the same way we have Eaton.

As well as the issue of proximity to whiteness, we must acknowledge the entangled fetishisation of a Black woman being the artistic subject of a group of white men. Black people were (and still are) deemed as the exotic “other”, provoking curiosity in how they looked and lived that was quelled through objectification. One just needs to acknowledge the history of Sara Baartman, aka the “Hottentot Venus”, or the phrenologic images of African heads to understand this. It has even been suggested, in one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings “The Beloved (‘The Bride’)”, that the inclusion of Eaton, along with another, darker-skinned, Black woman, was intended to emphasise the whiteness, or virginal representation, of the protagonist (bride). 

After around a decade of being a central muse in Victorian art, Eaton disappeared from the canvas. In 1881, she was widowed and left to care for ten children. She went on to work as a seamstress and then as a domestic cook for a wine merchant’s family. Fanny Eaton died in 1924 at the age of 88. Following her death, her significance has largely been ignored by the Western art world. It was not until recent years that her story was brought to public attention. In 2019, she was included in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery entitled Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, and in 2020, she was memorialised in a Google Doodle.

Fanny Eaton is undeniably integral to Black British history, as well as British history as a whole. She flipped the table of accepted Victorian beauty standards and shone a light on Black femininity, grace, and beauty, arguably paving the way for contemporary Black British supermodels, such as Naomi Campbell, Jourdan Dunn and Adwoa Aboah.