Fanny Eaton

Simeon Solomon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sitter was born Fanny Entwistle in Jamaica in 1835 to a Black mother recently freed from slavery. Her father may have been a white Scottish soldier who died soon after her birth. Mother and daughter moved to London in the 1840s, where Fanny married a horse-cab driver in 1857 and began to model for artists by 1859. Her biracial features helped Solomon breathe new life into Old Testament subjects. The young artist explored his Jewish heritage and followed Pre-Raphaelite precepts when he added authentic archaeological details to biblical compositions. He used studies of Fanny to reimagine ancient Hebrew heroines as dark-skinned and Semitic rather than white European. This drawing—dated October 2—is, however, more of a sensitive portrait than a study "in character."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art