She was born around 1839, because she was just 20 years old when she signed an 1859 petition asking the Royal Academy of Arts to open its doors to women. Her father, painter Marshall Claxton, trained Florence and her sister Adelaide, in his craft. Florence travelled with her father to Australia, India, and Egypt in the years from 1850 to 1857, while he searched for employment.
Claxton also wrote and illustrated many humorous commentaries on contemporary life. Little is known of Claxton"s life. Even her birth and death dates are uncertain.
In the later 1850s both sisters found work in the production of engravings for the popular press
In 1860, Florence illustrated Married Office: A Satirical Poem, by "H. B."
In 1858 Florence exhibited her painting Scenes from the of a Female Artist in the second annual show of the Society of Women Artists. In the following year, 1859, she signed a petition advocating the admission of women to the Royal Academy Schools, and exhibited her Scenes of of an Old Maid in the Society of Women Artists show.
Claxton"s best-known work is: An Idyll (c 1860), a satire on, and parody of, the works of the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the previous years. 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
lieutenant depicts Millais in the role of Paris, offering the golden apple to a scrawny-looking medieval woman, ignoring a Raphael madonna (copied from The Marriage of the Virgin) and a modern woman in crinolines.
The painting also includes parodies of other Pre-Raphaelite works, including Millais" Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Spring: Apple Blossoms and The Vale of Rest. lieutenant also caricatures Calderon"s Broken Vows and Windus"s Burd Helen". The picture was reproduced as a full-page engraving by the Illustrated London News.
Quotations: "thank goodness it"s only a midsummer night"s dream and I"m not emancipated".
