The Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, has acquired a portrait by British painter Maria Flaxman, depicting Eleanor Anne Porden.
About the work
This remarkable portrait may be situated within the rare framework of female engagement with the arts in Britain at the outset of the nineteenth century. The artist, Maria Flaxman, also called Mary Anne, was the half-sister of the celebrated sculptor John Flaxman. She exhibited at the Free Society of Artists, the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy between 1786 and 1819, presenting portraits, especially miniatures, and genre scenes drawing from literature, including Ferdinand and Matilda Playing Chess (1819, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and Maternal Piety (1819, from Samuel Rogers’ Human Life: a Poem, published the same year). An accomplished draughtsman, she is perhaps best known for her six designs for illustrations of William Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper, which were engraved by William Blake and published in 1803. She is also known to have sculpted in wax. For several years Flaxman lived as a governess with the Hare Naylor family, first in Italy and afterwards in Weimar, and from 1810 she lived with John Flaxman and his wife in Buckingham Street, assisting the sculptor until his death in 1826. The fluid classical lines of her brother’s work greatly influenced her own style, which was described by the author Alexander Gilchrist in 1807 as “expressive and beautiful…[her works] abound in grace of line, elegance of composition, and other artist-like virtues”. A miniature portrait attributed to Maria as a self-portrait (c. 1820, National Portrait Gallery, London) shows her aged about fifty in a white, lace-edged mob cap, ruff collar and pale blue shawl over a purple dress, serenely smiling.
It is through Flaxman’s links to London’s literary circles that she would have come to know her sitter, Eleonor Anne Porden (1795–1825), a celebrated poet from the age of seventeen. The younger of the two surviving daughters of the distinguished architect William Porden, little is recorded of Eleanor’s mother, an invalid, but from the age of fourteen Eleanor nursed her, effectively becoming mistress of her father’s house and his chief companion, first in Devonshire Street and subsequently in Berners Street, London. Educated privately and under the direction of her father, Eleanor was not confined to a conventional female curriculum but read widely in chemistry, geology, natural history and botany and regularly attended lectures given by leading scientists at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. Such topics would come to play thematic roles in her writing. At sixteen Porden completed a long erudite poem entitled The Veils, or, The Triumph of Constancy; published in 1815 by John Murray, it was, rather unusually for the time given the author’s sex, age and nationality, commended by the Institut de France. Other poems followed, including The Arctic Expeditions (1818) and Coeur de Lion, or, The Third Crusade (1822). The Arctic Expeditions was inspired by a visit to HMS Alexander and Isabella, then being equipped for polar exploration; Coeur de Lion, her most ambitious work published in sixteen volumes, was much in keeping with the fashion for bloody tales of medieval heroism popular in the second decade of the nineteenth century.
During these years Porden mixed with a fashionable and distinguished literary, scientific and artistic London set, the inner circle of which was dubbed “The Attic Chest” and included the Flaxmans. An especially lively correspondent said to havehad many male admirers, in 1823 Eleanor married Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), a naval officer and already famous Arctic explorer. Independently minded and confident in her talent, Eleanor made it a condition of their marriage that Franklin, taciturn and inclined to disapproval, respect her continuing career as a poet as equally necessary to her as his hazardous profession was to him. She wrote in a letter of 23 March 1823: “it was the pleasure of Heaven to bestow those talents on me, and it was my father’s pride to cultivate them to the utmost of his power. I should therefore be guilty of a double dereliction of duty in abandoning their exercise” (Edith Mary Gell, John Franklin's Bride, London, 1930, p. 105).
Upon their marriage the couple settled at 55 Devonshire Street, in the house in which Eleanor had been born. There on 3 June 1824 their daughter, also Eleanor, was born. But Eleanor never fully recovered from the birth; by the end of the year she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died at home on 22 February 1825, six days after John Franklin embarked on his second Arctic voyage carrying with him the flag Eleanor had embroidered to be raised at the northernmost point the expedition reached.