Krannert Art Museum acquires painting by Maria Flaxman

18 January 2022

The Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, has acquired a portrait by British painter Maria Flaxman, depicting Eleanor Anne Porden.

This portrait belongs to the narrow history of women's engagement with the arts in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Maria Flaxman, also called Mary Anne, was the half-sister of the sculptor John Flaxman, and exhibited at the Free Society of Artists, the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy between 1786 and 1819, showing portraits, mostly miniatures, and subjects taken from literature. She is best known for her six designs for William Hayley's Triumphs of Temper, engraved by William Blake and published in 1803, and she also worked in wax. She spent several years as a governess with the Hare Naylor family in Italy and then in Weimar, and from 1810 lived with her brother and his wife in Buckingham Street, assisting him until his death in 1826. The classical line of his work shaped her own. A miniature in the National Portrait Gallery, attributed to her as a self-portrait of about 1820, shows her at around fifty in a lace-edged cap and pale blue shawl.

Flaxman is likely to have met her sitter through London's literary circles. Eleanor Anne Porden (1795 to 1825) was known as a poet from the age of seventeen. The younger surviving daughter of the architect William Porden, she nursed her invalid mother from the age of fourteen and became in effect the mistress of her father's house and his closest companion. Her education was private and directed by him, and it ranged well beyond the usual female curriculum into chemistry, geology, natural history and botany, with regular attendance at lectures at the Royal Institution. Those subjects found their way into her writing. At sixteen she completed The Veils, or, The Triumph of Constancy, published by John Murray in 1815 and commended by the Institut de France. The Arctic Expeditions followed in 1818, written after a visit to the ships then being fitted out for polar exploration, and Coeur de Lion, or, The Third Crusade in 1822.

Porden moved in a literary, scientific and artistic circle whose inner group was known as the Attic Chest and included the Flaxmans. In 1823 she married Sir John Franklin (1786 to 1847), the naval officer and Arctic explorer, on the condition that he respect her continuing work as a poet as necessary to her as his own profession was to him. She wrote in March that year that her talents had been given to her and cultivated by her father, and that to abandon them would be a double dereliction of duty. The couple settled at 55 Devonshire Street, the house where she had been born, and their daughter was born there in June 1824. She never fully recovered, was diagnosed with tuberculosis by the end of the year, and died at home on 22 February 1825, six days after Franklin sailed on his second Arctic voyage carrying a flag she had embroidered to be raised at the expedition's furthest point.