Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart stars as Fanny Eaton in Out of the Picture

THE story of a King’s Cross char lady from Jamaica whose image graces some of the most famous paintings of the Victorian age is to be staged at the Riverside Studios as part of Windrush 75 events.

Entitled Out of the Picture, the one-woman play features up and coming actress Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart as Fanny Eaton, who posed as an artists’ model for a number of convention-defying Pre-Raphaelite painters in the 1860s, including the most celebrated of them all, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Despite inspiring more than 20 works of art that now hang in the world’s top galleries, the mother-of-10 died in obscurity and lay for years in an unmarked grave. “Although she has been the subject of academic interest in recent years, there isn’t much information about her other than she appeared in all these pictures,” says playwright Angela Bolger.

“Even her descendants didn’t know the facts of her life. In the play she is stepping out of the picture to talk to us today.”

Born in 1835, Fanny came to England as a young girl with her mother, a former slave, and grew up in St Pancras. Following her marriage to James Eaton, a horse-cab driver, she moved to Tonbridge Street, around the corner from her mother’s home in Cromer Street, and made a living as a cleaner.

This is how she met Simeon Solomon, a young artist who lived with his family in John Street, Bloomsbury, a 10-minute walk away. “It may be that Fanny worked for them or in the house of one of their neighbours and was spotted,” explains Ms Bolger.

In 1860 Eaton appeared in Solomon’s Mother of Moses, now held at the Delaware Art Museum in the US, and she began to model regularly at the Royal Academy.

Here she caught the eye of Rossetti, whose Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to reflect major issues of the day like slavery and imperialism.

Fanny served as an artist’s muse for 10 years before disappearing from view. She died aged 89 in Hammers­mith, where she is buried.

Shakespeare-Hart, who appeared in the Amazon Prime comedy series Ten Percent, plays Fanny and 12 other characters to tell her story with the help of some of the masterpieces she graces, among them Rossetti’s 1865 painting The Beloved. The 50-minute play is being staged at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith tomorrow (June 24, 7pm start) as part of a tour that also takes in schools and community hubs.

It is directed by Faith Tingle-Bartoli.

The final performance will be on July 1 at the Beethoven Centre in Queen’s Park, where it premiered last autumn.

• For more info, email fannyeatonplay@gmail.com riversidestudios.co.uk