Penelope Boothby

Penelope Boothby (11 April 178513 March 1791) was a girl who has become one of the most famous child characters in British art. Her image inspired the paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, John Everett Millais, a sculpture by Thomas Banks, photographs of Lewis Carroll, as well as sonnets of Brooke Boothby, her father.

According to art historians and historians, in the art of the 19th–20th centuries Penelope Boothby became a classic child of the Romantic era, the keeper of heavenly innocence, a symbol of "what we have lost and what we are afraid to lose".

Biography

Penelope was the daughter of Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet (1744–1824), linguist, translator and poet, and his wife, Susanna Bristoe (1755–1822). Boothby highly appreciated the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was the translator of his works. She died in 1791 at age 5 years, 11 months, after an illness that lasted about a month. She was unsuccessfully treated by Erasmus Darwin.

Her grieving father memorialised his child with the commission of a painting by Henry Fuseli depicting Penelope taken up to heaven in the arms of an angel; and also a sculpture by Thomas Banks for her tomb in St Oswald's Church, Ashbourne that depicts her asleep.