Florence Anne Claxton was an English artist and humorist, most notable for her satire on the Pre-Raphaelite

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

 movement. Claxton also wrote and illustrated many humorous commentaries on contemporary life.

Life

Little is known of Claxton's life; even her birth and death dates are uncertain. Her father, painter Marshall Claxton

Marshall Claxton

Marshall Claxton was an English subject, genre, landscape and portrait painter.-Life:Claxton was born in Bolton, Lancashire, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev. Marshall Claxton, and his wife Diana...

, trained his daughters, Florence and Adelaide, in his craft; Florence travelled with her father to Australia, India, and Egypt in the years from 1850 to 1857, while he searched for employment. In the later 1850s both sisters found work in the production of engravings for the popular press. In 1860, Florence illustrated Married Off: A Satirical Poem, by "H. B."

In 1858 Florence exhibited her painting Scenes from the Life of a Female Artist in the second annual show of the Society of Women Artists. In the following year, 1859, she signed a petition advocating the admission of women to the Royal Academy

Royal Academy

The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...

 Schools, and exhibited her Scenes of Life of an Old Maid in the Society of Women Artists

Society of Women Artists

-History :The Society was founded in 1855 as the Society of Female Artists and held its first exhibition two years later. The Society has since held an annual exhibition in London of work by women artists....

 show.

The Choice of Paris

Claxton's best-known work is The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (c. 1860), a satire on, and parody of, the works of the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the previous years. The painting is patterned after William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt OM was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Biography:...

's A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the persecution of the Druids

A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids

A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids is a painting by William Holman Hunt that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. It was a companion to John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents...

, and combines caricatures of many of the main figures of the movement, including John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 and Sir John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...

, with figures of popular culture like P. T. Barnum

P. T. Barnum

Phineas Taylor Barnum was an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the circus that became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus....

, and allusions to the great artists of the past. It depicts Millais in the role of Paris, offering the golden apple to a scrawny-looking medieval woman, ignoring a Raphael madonna (copied from The Marriage of the Virgin) and a modern woman in crinoline

Crinoline

Crinoline was originally a stiff fabric with a weft of horse-hair and a warp of cotton or linen thread. The fabric first appeared around 1830, but by 1850 the word had come to mean a stiffened petticoat or rigid skirt-shaped structure of steel designed to support the skirts of a woman’s dress into...

s. The painting also includes parodies of other Pre-Raphaelite works, including Millais' Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Spring: Apple Blossoms and The Vale of Rest. It also caricatures Calderon's Broken Vows and Windus

William Lindsay Windus

William Lindsay Windus was an English painter, part of a group of Liverpool painters who were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite style.-Life and work:...

's Burd Helen. The picture was reproduced as a full-page engraving by the Illustrated London News

Illustrated London News

The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper; the first issue appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842. It was published weekly until 1971 and then increasingly less frequently until publication ceased in 2003.-History:...

.

Other works

Other examples of Claxton's works were also reproduced in newspapers of the day. In Utopian Christmas, reproduced in the Illustrated London News of 24 December 1859, the poor - barefooted and raggedly-dressed - are shown feasting at a lavish banquet and being served and entertained by the rich - depicted as generals, nobles, and finely-dressed ladies.

Other works by Claxton include Women's Work: A Medley (1861) and Scenes from the Life of a Governess (1863). Women's Work may have been a feminist riposte to Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...

's painting Work, which focused on men's labors but neglected women.

Florence Claxton married a "Mr. Farrington, of Romsey," in 1868, but continued to work and exhibit at least sporadically afterward.

Claxton also wrote humorous skits on feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 and women's rights, most notably in The Adventures of a Woman in Search of her Rights, a story in cartoon form. In the book, a young woman falls in love with a dashing youth, but her parents do not approve and her lover leaves. She decides to pursue her rights. She loses her looks through much study; now made ugly, she pursues various careers, becoming a lawyer, a politician and a doctor, but eventually fails in all of her pursuits. She finally emigrates to the United States and marries Brigham Young

Brigham Young

Brigham Young was an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death in 1877, he founded Salt Lake City, and he served as the first governor of the Utah...

, the polygamous

Polygamy

Polygamy is a marriage which includes more than two partners...

 Mormon

Mormon

The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...

leader. In the end, it turns out to have been all a dream and she ends with the words "thank goodness it's only a midsummer night's dream and I'm not emancipated".