Past and Present, No. 2

This is the second of a set of three modern-life pictures on the theme of the fallen woman. The other two (N03278 and N03280) are also in the Tate collection. They are typical of the social moralist pictures that were popular in Victorian art.

The theme of the triptych is the discovery of the woman's infidelity and its consequences. In the first scene the family are still together, and the husband has just learned of his wife's adultery. The second scene is a dimly-lit garret, five years later. The room is sparsely furnished and the few decorations include two portraits of the absent mother and father. The father has recently died and the mother has been driven out of her home, a fallen woman. The two orphaned girls comfort each other, the elder gazing sadly over the rooftops towards the moon.

When the set of pictures was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1858, the drawing-room scene was hung between the other two. The writer and art critic John Ruskin described the three works in his Academy Notes,

In the central piece the husband discovers his wife's infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their lost mother, and their mother, from behind a boat under a vault on the river shore. (John Ruskin, Academy Notes, 8 May 1858.)

The pictures were exhibited with no title, but with this subtitle, 'August the 4^th - Have just heard that B - has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!' In Victorian England a man could safely take a mistress without fear of recrimination, but for a woman to be unfaithful was an unforgivable crime. As Caroline Norton, an early feminist, wrote, 'the faults of women are visited as sins, the sins of men are not even visited as faults' (quoted in Lambourne, p.374).

Further reading:
Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting, London 1999, pp.374-5, reproduced p.376, in colour.
Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, London 1999, pp.52-3, reproduced p.53, in colour.

Frances Fowle
1 December 2000