How an artist without arms and legs painted a portrait of Queen Victoria: "Miracle of Wonders" Sarah Biffen

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When Sarah Biffen was born, no one thought she would live to maturity. Her parents sold her to a traveling circus - and she, while entertaining the audience, learned to paint. Sarah Biffen is a small woman with a great will to live who has had the opportunity to paint portraits of the Queen Victoria family.

On a cloudy October day - or perhaps a dark October night - in 1784, a girl was born into a family of farmers in Somerset. Looking at their child, instead of joy, the parents first experienced horror. The baby had neither arms nor legs - only rudiments resembling the flippers of a seal. However, they were Christians - and decided to pray for the soul of a baby, not knowing if the girl would last even a couple of hours. When the thalidomide catastrophe broke out in the mid-1950s, leading to phocomelia - underdevelopment of the limbs in the womb in many children, only fifty survived percent of them. At the end of the eighteenth century, even medicine available to the rich could not help such a child - and Sarah's parents were not at all rich! But already in the first days of her life, Sarah showed herself to be a real fighter.

As a child, she demonstrated miracles of dexterity, endurance and quick wits. She learned to service herself, to mend clothes, clamping the thread in her mouth, but for her family she still remained a burden, because she could not work on the farm. When she was twelve, her parents sold Sarah to a traveling circus run by a certain Mr. The so-called "freak circuses" were then at the peak of their popularity. In those years, a person who was born with an obvious disability in a poor family had two paths - death and public humiliation. However, they themselves quickly resigned themselves to their fate and even began to derive some benefit for themselves. Some of the "circus freaks" managed to save money for a quiet old age, someone arranged a personal life inside the circus …

The hallmark of the Dukes circus was … routine. Fused twins, people covered with wool or with deformed parts of the body routinely made tea, shaved, fired pistols at targets (it was not necessary to hit) - and the audience was happy. Dukes wondered what role to assign to the girl without arms and legs? And I decided to teach her … to draw. After all, drawing can be difficult to master for perfectly healthy people, and Sarah, according to Dukes, would look great with a brush in her mouth - such an inspired, focused and charming baby. In Victorian England, it was not so easy for a woman to become a professional artist, to sell her paintings, but the circus actress succeeded! Sarah proved to be a capable student and quickly surpassed her teacher. She was required to write a couple of mediocre sketches, but Biffen turned out to be a real perfectionist and between performances she trained and practiced, creating new works.

Soon, people began to pay for more than just watching a deprived girl apply paints to canvas. They were ready to buy her work! There were real lines of customers lining up to Sarah, and she was able to raise the price without losing demand. But she continued to study, perfecting technique, precision and beauty of performance. From sketches and sketches, Sarah moved on to exquisite miniatures, portraits and landscapes in ivory.

In Victorian England, medallions with a portrait of a loved one (sometimes there could only be a skillfully painted eye to guarantee anonymity), hometown or idol were insanely popular. Such crumbled drawings could be admired alone or given to someone close. Sarah Biffen chose the difficult, but stable and rather monetary business of a miniaturist who creates drawings for medallions. Of course, the fact that they were written by an unusual woman added value to her work. Biffen gripped a tiny brush in her mouth, concentrated to the limit, worked quickly and efficiently - and people were willing to pay.

In 1808 she performed at the fair of St. Bartholomew. There she was presented by her entrepreneur as "a miracle of miracles." Anyone who saw her at work confirmed that young Miss Biffen is truly magnificent. A certain Earl of Morton, interested in advertising, looked into her tent to see the very "miracle" - but was skeptical. Imagine his surprise when he saw not just an actress who learned a few brush strokes, but a real artist! The count was amazed. He immediately assigned Sarah to content and found her a teacher, an artist at the Royal Academy, William Craig. So Sarah, straight from the itinerant circus, became one of the artists of the Royal Academy.

Her miniatures were highly acclaimed. In 1821, the Society of Artists of the Royal Academy awarded her a medal. Queen Victoria's family commissioned her a series of miniature portraits. Earl of Morton helped Sarah open her own portrait studio on Bond Street in London, her fame resounded throughout England, and Charles Dickens was mentioned in two of his novels. Preserved prints made from her self-portraits and portraits by other artists - on them she looks like a respectable lady with beautiful curls, in luxurious jewelry and furs.

However, in 1827, Sarah suffered grief - her benefactor and friend, Earl of Morton, died. For Sarah, hard times came, it became difficult for her to work, she felt betrayed - although she understood that the count would never leave her of his own free will. However, Queen Victoria herself came to the rescue! She appointed the artist a lifetime maintenance, and fans of Sarah Biffen's talent supported her with money. Little is known about the last years of Sarah Biffen's life. She closed the studio and moved to Liverpool. Several of her works have survived under the name Wright, and references like "Mrs. Sarah Wright, nee Biffen" - maybe Sarah found her love? In her retirement, she never stopped writing, although not much, and passed away at the age of sixty-six.