The Face that Launched the Pre-Raphaelites

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.” ( Matthew 13:45-46)

Matilda Fanny Eaton was born in Jamaica in 1835 and in the 1840s with her mother came to live in London. She found work as a domestic servant before marrying John Eaton, a cab owner and driver, in 1857. She bore him ten children between 1858 and 1879. She was widowed in 1881 when her husband was only forty-three and became a seamstress. Later she moved to the Isle of Wight taking a job as cook for a wine merchant and his wife. By 1911 she had come back to London to live in Hammersmith with one of her daughters and her family. She died aged eighty-eight in 1924 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Margravine Cemetery.

An industrious, long but really unexceptional life if it was not for eight years, 1859 – 1867. You will have seen Matilda Eaton if you have been to Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions. She is the young woman on the left in The Pearl of Great Price.

You may not have been to Delaware but you may remember this from an exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery (The Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, 2019/20). Matilda Eaton models as the mother of Moses and I wonder if she is also depicted as Miriam (Moses’s sister) – they look alike? She also modelled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Joanna Mary Boyce, Rebecca Solomon and others and at the Royal Academy of Arts school of painting. She has become immortal – I wonder if she ever suspected she would be a pearl of great price?

Only in this century did researchers uncover her contribution to the Pre-Raphaelite school and there matters might have rested without the interest of her great grandson and his wife, Brian and Mary Eaton. Now, ninety-eight years after her death, she is commemorated by a distinctive headstone in Margravine Cemetery.