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.
That Porden selected a female artist to paint her portrait is not surprising—her belief in the rights of women to practice as poets or artists was made clear in the letter to her prospective husband mentioned above. At the same time, these two women had enjoyed an especially close friendship, meeting and corresponding regularly from Maria’s return to London in 1810 until Eleanor’s death a decade and a half later—in their witty and animated letters to one another they often use the sobriquets Moth (for Maria) and Stella (for Eleanor). In 1811, Maria submitted a miniature portrait of Eleanor to the Royal Academy exhibition (no. 645). The miniature, like the present portrait, remained with the family of Eleanor and John Franklin’s daughter, Eleanor Isabella Franklin, who married into the Gell family in 1849, becoming the wife of Reverend John Philip Gell. They had five children, and one of them, Philip Lyttelton Gell, purchased Hopton Hall in or around 1918. Both portraits passed through the family until it was decided by later descendants to sell the Hall and its contents in 1989.
Flaxman’s portrait of Eleanor Porden, her most ambitious surviving painting on canvas, likely executed around 1820, beautifully captures both the sitter’s intellectual prowess and her physical fragility, as well as the vogue for classical design in Regency Britain. Eleanor is shown in repose upon an elegantly curving red-upholstered chaise longue, leaning upon a writing desk, quill in hand and poised above a sheet of writing paper. She wears a simple white muslin dress and is encircled by a filmy white voile wrap adorned with a Greek key design, looping casually over a blue-slippered foot. Atop the desk are two red leatherbound volumes—perhaps containing the sitter’s own verse—and an extraordinarily striking boat-shaped sterling inkstand embellished with acanthus leaves and containing three glass pots of translucent greenish-black ink. The table and chaise longue closely relate to pieces by Thomas Hope (1769–1831), the innovative and influential designer who helped define the Regency style. The table with its winged chimera supports closely resembles a design by Hope published in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1807, pl. 15, fig. 2), while the chaise-longue seems to adapt a form found in the same volume (pl. 28, fig. 3).
Although classical vases appear beside the sitters of many British portraits of the period, as in Sir Martin Archer Shee’s portrait of Hope’s wife Louisa (1807, private collection), the one in the present portrait seems less a fashionable bit of classical capriccio and more a mark of erudition. In form and embellishment it closely resembles the Medici Vase, many copies of which could be found in England in the early nineteenth century. However, the frieze running across the body of the vase substitutes the Sacrifice of Iphigenia on the Medici Vase for the procession of a bull towards a sacrificial altar, a subject found on the antique vase in the garden at Holland House which was among the inspirations for John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, first published in 1819. Such resonances, and the theme of ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry) explored by Keats, would have been evident both to the painter and to her sitter, whose Romantic spirit is likewise reflected in the wild twilight landscape visible beyond the red-draped window.
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