Florence Ann Claxton was born in Florence, Italy on 26 August 1838. Her family subsequently spent several years in Australia, India, and Egypt, before returning to England around 1857. She received her artistic training from her father and later attended Cary's Academy in London, after settling there. In England, Claxton established herself as a painter and illustrator. Florence Ann Claxton died in Sandown, Isle of Wight, England on 3 May 1920.
Painter and illustrator Florence Ann Claxton was born on 26 August 1838 in Florence, Italy. Her father was English painter, Marshall Claxton, and her mother was Sophia (née Hargrave). She was named after her birthplace and baptised at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, in January 1839. Her father, a Royal Academy gold-medallist who specialised in historical scenes and portraiture, had brought the family to Florence to further his own artistic studies. In 1850, with his career stalling in England, Marshall Claxton emigrated with the family to Sydney, Australia, where relatives of his wife had established themselves in New South Wales. Despite receiving commissions and credit for staging what was described as Australia's first art exhibition, his ambitions were not fulfilled. The family relocated to Calcutta, India, in 1854, and eventually returned to England around 1857, travelling via Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Egypt. Florence and her sister Adelaide received their artistic training chiefly from their father, who gave drawing classes for ladies at their Kensington home. Both sisters also attended Cary's Academy (formerly Sass's Academy), one of the few London art schools to admit women students before 1860. In 1868 Claxton married Ernest Farrington, a French photographer and engineer, in Paris; the couple had no children.
Claxton worked in watercolour, oil, and pen and ink, producing both exhibited paintings and illustrations for the periodical press. Her years of travel across the world, before settling in England as a young adult, appear to have sharpened her capacity to observe Victorian society from a critical distance, informing the satirical edge that characterises her work across all media. Her comic approach drew on the tradition of earlier caricaturists, such as George Cruikshank and John Leech, while addressing the constraints facing women artists and the aesthetic posturing of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1858 she exhibited a series of six satirical pen and ink drawings entitled Scenes from the Life of a Female Artist at the Second Annual Exhibition of the Society of Female Artists in London. In 1858, Claxton broke new ground as the first woman to draw her designs directly onto a woodblock for a weekly illustrated newspaper, contributing a full-page engraving entitled 'Miserable Sinners' to the Illustrated Times. In 1859 she was one of the artists who signed a petition published in the Athenaeum demanding that women be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. She also began following in her father's footsteps and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts itself (in 1859, 1865, 1866, 1867). Her watercolour The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (c. 1860), exhibited at the National Institution of Fine Arts, Portland Gallery, London, incorporated parodies of more than fifteen Pre-Raphaelite paintings by figures including John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and was reproduced as a full-page engraving in the Illustrated London News on 2 June 1860. Her only known exhibited oil painting, Women's Work: A Medley (1861), featured 34 figures satirising the limited professional options available to Victorian middle-class women; it has since been described as probably the first consciously feminist allegory in British art. From 1862 Claxton contributed regularly to London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature, and in 1870 published The Adventures of a Woman in Search of Her Rights, a satirical illustrated narrative containing approximately 100 of her own drawings.
Florence Ann Claxton died on 3 May 1920 at her home, Grafton House, in Sandown, Isle of Wight, England. Posthumously, Claxton's work has received renewed critical attention in recent decades: a version of The Choice of Paris: An Idyll was included in Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain in 2012, and Women's Work: A Medley was shown as part of Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 held at Tate Britain in 2024, displayed for the first time since it was painted. Her works are held in UK public collections including Manchester Art Gallery, the National Trust, Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Ben Uri Research Unit welcomes contributions from researchers or family members who might have further biographical information.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Florence Claxton]
Publications related to [Florence Claxton] in the Ben Uri Library