Florence 1838-1920 & Adelaide 1841-1927 Claxton
Florence Ann Claxton (later Farrington)
Artist.
26 August 1838 – 3 May 1920
A Tribute by Karen Westendorf
Adelaide Sophia Claxton
Artist, inventor.
10 May 1841 – 29 August 1927
Florence and Adelaide were the daughters of painter Marshall Claxton (1813-1881), who specialised in historical scenes and portraiture. Florence was born during her parents’ stay in Florence, Italy, where her father furthered his artistic skills. Adelaide was born in London.
There were few opportunities for women to train as professional artists and the sisters received most of their artistic education from their father. Marshall Claxton gave ‘ladies only’ classes at his home in Kensington to supplement the family income. Florence and Adelaide also studied for a short time at Cary’s Academy, an art school that had been founded by artist Henry Sass (1788-1844) in 1818 and one of the first to admit female students. He had moved his school to No. 6 Charlotte Street in Bloomsbury in 1820. The location benefited from its proximity to the British Museum which housed the Elgin Marbles. These were popular models for drawing exercises. The academy was well-known as a stepping-stone for budding artists to gain entry to the prestigious Royal Academy Schools (RA). John Everett Millais (1829-1896), William Powell-Frith (1819-1909) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), for example, trained at Cary’s. However, it was impossible for women to enrol at the RA, although their works were accepted for its exhibitions. The idea that their male peers were able to advance from Cary’s Academy to the famous institution, whilst they did not have the least chance of doing the same, must have been galling for talented young women like the Claxton sisters. A group of female artists, including Florence Claxton, launched a petition to the Royal Academy in 1859. They demanded a change in the rules to allow female students. The letter was sent to all members of the RA and published in the Athenaeum. It had no success.
The sisters may well have preferred to be career painters, which would have been almost impossible in a male-dominated art establishment, however they did make their living as illustrators. Florence highlighted this problem in a series of six satirical pen and ink drawings called Scenes from the Life of a Female Artist, which she exhibited at the Society of Female Artists in 1858. The Society had been founded by writer Harriet Grote (1792-1878) and artist Mrs Robertson Blaine in 1857 to give support and training to women artists. Today the organisation is known as The Society of Women Artists.
Florence started working for the Illustrated Times in 1858 and according to Ellen Clayton, author of English female artists (1876), was the first woman to draw her designs directly on the woodblock. Catherine Flood, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, explains that it was believed “that women were physically and mentally better suited to dextrous and repetitive crafts than expressive art” which meant that they were rather employed to engrave the woodblock than to design and draw an image on the wood. The idea was that women simply lacked the imagination and technical skill to produce quality illustrations. Florence and Adelaide Claxton, and their contemporary Mary Ellen Edwards (1838-1934), proved these assumptions wrong and led the way for other female illustrators.
Credit: Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Credit: Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Adelaide Claxton followed her sibling’s footsteps when she received her first illustrating commission from the London Society in 1862. She became a frequent contributor to Judy, the great competitor of Punch. Flood observes that the sisters carved “a niche” for themselves with their humorous depictions of society. They avoided vulgarity and aggression – undoubtedly also to uphold their respectable reputation, which was imperative for a Victorian woman – but nevertheless cast a critical and satirical eye on their contemporaries. This was received well by publishers; in fact, they became so well-known that magazines used their names to increase sales. Henry Vizetelly (1820-94), co-founder of the Illustrated London News, Pictorial Times and Illustrated Times, described the Claxton sisters as “very smart young ladies” who “cleverly satirised the social follies of both hemispheres.”
Credit: Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Credit: ‘Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries’
Credit: ‘Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries’
Although the Claxtons and Edwards were trailblazers as artists, they were not the first 19th century female illustrators. However, Victorian middle-class women who made their own living were often looked upon with suspicion and had to work hard to be accepted by male peers and the public. It is therefore remarkable that the burgeoning periodical press, from the 1850s onwards, became an important industry to offer women the chance to earn a regular income as engravers, illustrators and even as editors and contributors of articles. Charles Henry Ross (1835-97), editor of Judy employed not only Adelaide Claxton but also his wife Marie Duval (real name Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, 1847-90), a French cartoonist. Editors such as James Hogg (1806-88) of London Society would even pay female illustrators the same rates as their male counterparts. Given that equal payment is still an on-going topic, this might seem surprisingly progressive.
Credit: Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
In the course of their illustrating careers, Adelaide and Florence Claxton worked for The Churchman’s Family Magazine, Illustrated London News, Illustrated Times, London Society and Queen, a magazine especially for female readers. But the pioneering sisters not only created innumerable images for magazines; they also exhibited paintings. Adelaide’s The Standard-Bearer, for example, was exhibited at the Society of Female Artists’ exhibition in 1859. It plays with the military term and turns it into a newspaper boy running after an omnibus and carrying The Standard in his hand. An engraved version of the oil painting was published in the Illustrated Times in March 1859. In 1860, Florence showed her watercolour The Choice of Paris: An Idyll, in which she satirised the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, at London’s Portland Gallery. It lampooned the Brotherhood’s obsession with medievalism, red-haired ‘stunners’ and their ‘true to nature’ painting style. It caused such a stir that a large reproduction was published in the Illustrated London News in June the same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Claxton
In June 1868, Florence married Ernest Farrington (died between 1881 and 1891), a French photographer and engineer, in Paris and, apart from exhibiting her watercolours occasionally, ceased her artistic career. She might have lived abroad for several years; however, she was back in the UK at the time of the 1881 census and stated her profession as ‘artist china painter’, a role that she might have taken up for financial reasons. She taught the technique and exhibited her works as well. Around 1911, she moved to the Isle of Wright; there she was found dead at her residence Grafton House, Sandown, in 1920. It is believed that she ended her life deliberately. Although her decision was most likely down to worries about failing health and money, the coroner probably officially concluded that she took the medication while ‘of an unsound mind’. Otherwise, she would have been denied a burial on consecrated ground as committing suicide was regarded a sin.
Adelaide married George Gordon Turner (1852-1905), the son of a clergyman, in 1874 and had a son at the age of 43. Unlike her sister, she carried on working as an illustrator during the 1870s and 1880s, particularly for Judy. Both, she and her husband, gave their profession as ‘artist’ in the 1881 census and lived in Chiswick, West London. Adelaide showed her watercolours at exhibitions, and her ghost paintings were much in demand. She also created drawings for advertisements for women’s clothing. In the census of 1891, she still called herself an ‘Artist in Colour Black & White’. In addition, she tried her hand at inventing from the 1890s onwards and patented, for example, the ‘Claxton Ear-cap’, which was still in production in the 1920s. She also invented a ‘Claxton Classical Corset’ that was less restricting than conventional ones – she was a member of the Rational Dress Association. The reputation she had gained as an artist helped promoting these products and she designed the adverts herself. By 1911 lived with her son in Barnes, South London. She died aged 86 in 1927.
Karen Westendorf, Curatorial and Technical Assistant, Aberystwyth University, School of Art
After a 20-year career in tourism in Germany and the UK, Karen decided to study Museum & Gallery Studies (BA) and Art History (MA) at Aberystwyth University School of Art. She has now been working as a Curatorial & Technical Assistant at the School of Art since 2016.
Sources:
Blanchard, Sidney Leman. Riddles of Love. Spring Street Books, 2013.
Cherry, Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. Routledge, 1993.
Cooke, Simon, Goldman, Paul. Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875; Spoils of the Lumber Room. Ashgate, 2012.
De Maré, Eric. The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators. Gordon Fraser, 1980.
Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki, Zakreski, Patricia eds. Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain. Ashgate, 2013.
Humble, Nicola, Reynolds, Kimberley. Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-century Literature and Art. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Van Remoortel, Marianne. Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: living by the press. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
https://www.daao.org.au/bio/florence-claxton/biography
https://www.society-women-artists.org.uk/history.html
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/109622
https://archive.org/details/englishfemalear02claygoog/page/n51
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project/institutions/sass_academy.htm
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O15050/the-choice-of-paris-an-watercolour-claxton-florence