Penelope Boothby (11 April 178513 March 1791) was a girl who has become one of the most famous child characters in

British art The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 and encompasses English art, Scottish art, Welsh art and Irish art, and forms ...

. Her image inspired the paintings by

Joshua Reynolds Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depend ...

Henry Fuseli Henry Fuseli ( ; German: Johann Heinrich Füssli ; 7 February 1741 – 17 April 1825) was a Swiss painter, draughtsman and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works, such as ''The Nightmare'', deal with supernatura ...

John Everett Millais Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, ( , ; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest ...

, a sculpture by

Thomas Banks Thomas Banks (29 December 1735 – 2 February 1805) was an important 18th-century English sculptor. Life The son of William Banks, a Surveyor (surveying), surveyor who was land steward to the Duke of Beaufort, he was born in London. He was e ...

, photographs of

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...

, sonnet of Brooke Boothby. Fuseli Henry The Apotheosis Of Penelope Boothby-1-1

According to art historians and historians, in the art of the 19th-20th centuries Penelope Boothby became a classic child of the

Romantic era Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

, the keeper of heavenly innocence, a symbol of “what we have lost and what we are afraid to lose.” The image of Penelope was actively exploited by

popular culture Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a ...

throughout the 20th century.

Biography

She was the daughter of

Sir Brooke Boothby Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet (3 June 174423 January 1824) was a British linguist, translator, poet and landowner, based in Derbyshire, England. He was part of the intellectual and literary circle of Lichfield, which included Anna Seward and Er ...

(1744-1824), linguist, translator and poet, and his wife, Susanna Bristoe (1755-1822). Boothby highly appreciated the ideas of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolu ...

and was the translator of his works. Penelope's father inherited the title in 1789, was also an amateur botanist, and collaborated in his research with

Erasmus Darwin Erasmus Robert Darwin (12 December 173118 April 1802) was an English physician. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, and poet. His poems ...

. He was well acquainted with several activists of the

Blue Stockings Society The Blue Stockings Society, an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century, emphasised education and mutual cooperation. Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and others founded it in the early 1750s as a li ...

, and was known as a connoisseur of fine arts and philanthropist. At the age of three (in July 1788), Penelope became a

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the Plan_(drawing), plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a mea ...

for the outstanding British artist Joshua Reynolds in his London studio (for the painting “Portrait of Penelope Boothby,” or “Cap”,

London National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director of ...

). Shortly after completing the portrait, Boothby and his daughter returned to Derbyshire, where his family estate at Ashbourne was located. Penelope probably spent the rest of her short life at

Ashbourne Hall Ashbourne Hall is a Manor house originally built by the Cockayne family in the 13th century in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. The present building is part of a largely demolished, Georgian-styled hall built in the 18th century. The Cockayne family Th ...

. Penelope was a quiet girl who preferred playing with dolls in solitude to any noisy fuss, although she had a cheerful disposition. She loved her father very much and waited at the gates of his return home, and in the evenings sat on his lap. On Sundays in the morning, she accompanied her mother to the old Ashbourne church and knelt beside her during the service. All this and much more can be learned from the book “Sorrows Sacred to the Memory of Penelope”, written by her father. The book includes 24 sonnets. She died in 1791 a month before her sixth birthday, after an illness that lasted about a month. She was unsuccessfully treated by Erasmus Darwin. Her grieving father also memorialized his child with the commission of a painting by

depicting Penelope taken up to heaven in the arms of an angel and a sculpture by

for her tomb that depicts her asleep.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boothby, Penelope People from Ashbourne, Derbyshire English artists' models 1785 births 1791 deaths People from Lichfield 18th-century British women