Adelaide Claxton

She was one of the first women artists to make a major part of her living through the commercial press, selling satirical and comic illustrations to more than half a dozen periodicals.

She studied art at Cary's School in the Bloomsbury area of London, where she began to focus on figure painting in watercolor.

Claxton's paintings combine scenes of domestic life with literary or fantasy elements like ghosts and dreams.

The English painter Walter Sickert based his oil painting She Was the Belle of the Ball [After Adelaide Claxton] on one of her works.

[3] Claxton also authored two illustrated books, A Shillingsworth of Sugar-Plums (1867; puzzlingly advertised as containing "several hundreds of Num-nums and Nicy-nicies") and Brainy Odds and Ends (1904; a compendium of mottoes and the like).