![]() ![]() ![]() Her black dress suggests that she is mourning someone and is likely to be supporting herself alone. The central character is a female artist in a vulnerable situation.įemale artists were uncommon in Victorian times. In Nameless and Friendless, Osborn shows us the situation of a single woman in Victorian England. Painted in 1857, it was intended as a political statement about women’s rights.Įmily Mary Osborn was one of the most important artists associated with the campaign for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. This is Nameless and Friendless by Emily Mary Osborn. She put her name to the 1859 petition demanding women’s access to the Royal Academy Schools, as well as to the 1889 Declaration in Favour of Woman’s Suffrage. Elsewhere, she was a dedicated campaigner for women’s rights. She was a member of the Society of Female Artists, established in 1857 to help women overcome the difficulties in exhibiting and selling their work. She used this position of power to help improve the lives of the kinds of women typically depicted in her genre paintings. Osborn was a successful painter, even counting Queen Victoria as a patron. The subtitle of the painting, taken from the Book of Proverbs, emphasises the often powerless situation of single women in the city. The other men in the room are either sneering or leering at her, while her mud-splattered skirt and downcast expression suggest a desperate situation. She seems resigned, as if she knows already that his answer will be a ‘no’. ![]() A young orphaned woman offers one of her paintings to a dealer. Nameless and Friendless is as bleak a painting as its title suggests. ![]()
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