This engaging portrait is situated in a rare framework of female engagement with the arts in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The artist, Maria Flaxman, was the half-sister of the celebrated sculptor John Flaxman, whom she assisted at the end of his life. The fluid classical lines of her brother’s work were evidently a great influence on 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’. She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1780 to 1819, though her fame as an artist derived chiefly from the engravings after her work done by William Blake, used as illustrations for William Hayley’s poetic work of 1803, the Triumphs of Temper.
It is through Flaxman’s links to London’s literary circles that she would have come to know her sitter, Eleonor Anne Porden, a celebrated poet from the age of seventeen. The youngest daughter of renowned architect William Porden, Eleonor was educated at home and later attended lectures at the Royal Institution on Chemistry, Botany, Geology and Natural History, all subjects that came to play within her first major work, The Veils; or the triumph of constancy, published in 1815. Three years later, she met her future husband, arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, and was inspired to write the short poem The Arctic Expeditions. Whilst Franklin was away on David Buchan’s British Naval North Polar Expedition, she researched and wrote her most famous work, Coeur de Lion, or The Third Crusade, an epic poem recounting the exploits of Richard I.
That Porden chose a female artist to paint her portrait is not surprising; her belief in the inherent rights of women to practice as poets or artists is made clear in a letter she wrote to Franklin six months prior to their marriage in 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.’ The continuation of her career was the condition of their marriage. Sadly, her health was fragile and she died shortly after Sir John had set off on his third arctic expedition. Flaxman’s portrait of Porden captures both her intellectual prowess and her physical fragility; the marble calyx behind her head suggests a link between her poetry and the writings of antiquity, while her reclining figure indicates a need for quiet repose.
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