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The Fine Art of Satire: Florence and Adelaide Claxton and the Magazines

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Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical

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Abstract

As the young Christina Rossetti sent her first poems to the magazines from the Rossetti family home in Upper Albany Street, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, two aspiring visual artists in their late teens, returned with their parents from a long stay abroad to their house in North Kensington. From 1850 to 1858, they had been travelling in Australia, India and Ceylon, where their father, historical painter Marshall Claxton, had hoped to find a market for his paintings. The experience left an indelible mark on his daughters. Not only did they both take up orientalist themes in their work but, more importantly, they grew up to be astute observers of their own society and culture. And they were made aware at an early age of the difficulties of finding profitable artistic employment.

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Notes

  1. Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘Look Homeward Angel: Marshall Claxton’s Emigrant’, Art Bulletin of Victoria 32 (1991), 8.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Belgium

    Marianne Van Remoortel

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  1. Marianne Van Remoortel
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© 2015 Marianne Van Remoortel

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Van Remoortel, M. (2015). The Fine Art of Satire: Florence and Adelaide Claxton and the Magazines. In: Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435996_6

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