Joanna Wells studied painting in London and Paris. She belonged to the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites and exhibited to acclaim for the first time in 1851 when John Ruskin warmly admired her work. Fanny Eaton was a biracial model of Jamaican heritage who posed for Wells and other Victorian artists such as Albert Moore, Frederick Sandys, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This small study was made in the last year of her life as she prepared a large canvas of Zenobia, the ancient queen of Syria. She died in childbirth before she could complete it.

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com

   This professional artists' model, Mrs. Eaton, was also drawn by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and by Albert Moore, Simeon Solomon, Frederick Sandys, and others. Despite heated debates about slavery and abolition in Britain during the nineteenth century, it seems that the issue of race was not raised publicly or even privately with respect to paintings of Mrs. Eaton in various historical or exotic guises. Both the ambiguity of Mrs. Eaton's ethnic identity-the title is the artist's, and "mulatto" was the contemporary term for a person of mixed race-and the fact that this picture was unsold at the artist's death and was apparently never exhibited during his lifetime, suggest that the artist may have been sensitive to its potentially controversial nature. However, it is known that the artist planned to employ the head of Mrs. Eaton in a planned historical portrayal of Zenobia, the magnificently defiant queen of ancient Palmyra.

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com