Florence Claxton

Florence Ann Claxton (26 August 1838 – 3 May 1920), later Farrington, was a British artist and humorist, most notable for her satire on the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Struggling as a painter, Marshall Claxton emigrated with his family in 1850 to Australia, where his brother-in-law Richard Hargrave had established himself as a settler in New South Wales.

The experience of international travel proved to be formulative to the sisters as artists, "both expanding the geographic scope of their subject matter and equipping them with something of an outsider's perspective on Victorian society.

"[2] The Claxton sisters were returned to England She was just about 20 years old when she signed an 1859 petition asking the Royal Academy of Arts to open its doors to women.

[6] The painting is patterned after William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the persecution of the Druids, and combines caricatures of many of the main figures of the movement, including John Ruskin and Sir John Everett Millais, with figures of popular culture like P. T. Barnum, and allusions to the great artists of the past.

In Utopian Christmas, reproduced in the Illustrated London News of 24 December 1859, the poor - barefooted and raggedly-dressed - are shown feasting at a lavish banquet and being served and entertained by the rich - depicted as generals, nobles, and finely-dressed ladies.

In the book, a young woman falls in love with a dashing youth, but her parents do not approve and her lover leaves.

She loses her looks through the study of John Stuart Mill and; now made ugly, she pursues various careers, becoming a lawyer, a politician and a doctor, but eventually fails in all of her pursuits.