Maud Franklin

Maud Franklin (9 January 1857 – 18 November 1939) was an English artist and the mistress and model for artist James McNeill Whistler. Life Franklin was born in Bicester, Oxfordshire, England, one of six children of Charles Franklin, an upholsterer and cabinetmaker, and Mary Clifton, after whom she was christened 'Mary'. She may have posed for Whistler as early as 1872, as a stand-in for his portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, when she was fifteen.

By the late 1870s, she was serving as a model to Whistler for etchings and painted portraits, most notably the Arrangement in White and Black. She also was the initial model for what would be the Portrait of Miss Florence Leyland, as well as Harmony in Grey and Peach Colour, numerous other oils, drawings, watercolours, etchings and lithographs. She sometimes referred to herself as 'Mrs. Whistler', and in the census of 1881 gave her name as 'Mary M. Whistler'.

After Whistler married Beatrice Godwin in 1888, Franklin moved to Paris. She married a New York man named John A. Little; in 1904 he died, and around 1911 Franklin married another American, Richard H. S. Abbott, and lived near Cannes until her death in 1939 aged 82.

Depictions by Whistler