82.5 × 103.8 cm (32.5 × 40.9 in)
Wikimedia Commons
Nameless and Friendless is a genre painting
Paintings that depict scenes of ordinary people going about their everyday lives. by the English artist Emily Mary Osborn (1828–1925), created in 1857, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. The picture depicts an orphaned female artist, identified as such by her black dress and lack of a mourning ring, attempting to sell one of her paintings to a dealer. A young boy, presumably her brother, stands by her side clutching a portfolio under his arm.[1][2][3]
The picture addresses what the art historian Deborah Cherry has described as “the sexualised encounters and economies of the modern city, its spaces of pleasure, exchange and consumption”.[4] It focuses on the predicament of the single woman in the Victorian metropolis, “a man’s domain within which women occupy a precarious position”. The female artist in the centre of the picture is being leered at by two rakish men otherwise engaged in examining a hand-coloured print of a scantily clad ballerina, while a “comfortable bourgeois matron [is] confidently leaving the shop with her son”. Thus Emily highlights three ways in which women inhabit the urban environment: “as figures of sexual desire and consumption, as ‘invisible’ wives secure in a family unit, and as unmarried women struggling to earn a living”.[1]
The painting’s full title when first exhibited, Nameless and Friendless. “The rich man’s wealth is his strong city, etc.” – Proverbs, x, 15, was a reference to the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, a compilation of various collections of proverbs some of which may be attributed to King Solomon.[5] Chapter 10:15 says that “The wealth of the rich man is his fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor”.
Nameless and Friendless was acquired by Tate Britain in 2009, with the assistance of Tate Members, the Millwood Legacy and a private donor.[6]
