October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

Fanny Eaton was born in Jamaica and became an artists’ model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, first in Simeon Solomon’s painting The Mother of Moses, and later in works by Rossetti, Millais, and others.

Fanny and her mother came to England from Jamaica in the 1840s, where Fanny worked as a servant. She became an artists’ model to add to her wages as a charwoman.

In 1857 she married James Eaton, a horse-cab proprietor and driver, and they had ten children. In the 1880s she had been widowed and was working as a cook on the Isle of Wight. She died in Acton at the age of 89.

More about Fanny Eaton at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Eaton