Victorian Art Depicting the Poor
Social Realist paintings were created as direct response to the squalid conditions the poor were living in. The theme was short lived, only really lasting in the 1870s. It aimed to protest against the harshness of the Poor Law, which had meant that outdoor relief was cut and relief was centralised to the workhouse. Despite prior attempts to show the plight of the poor and the conditions they lived in, there still remained a reluctance to portray any hardness in the lifestyle surrounding any image of them. There was a fear that poverty had changed its meaning since industrialisation, so there was some desire to portray it in order to gain understanding. However, attempts often felt otherworldly as they sought to portray the ‘new citizens of the Empire’. The main theme of art from the early nineteenth century onwards was patriotic, portraying national greatness and reaffirming the superiority of middle class contemporary morality. This meant that there was little appeal for paintings depicting the poor as they were seen as undoing national greatness. It was especially evident in the theory suggesting that the condition of people’s bodies reflected the health of the State. If the poor were in ill health, they were living in “conditions which might give rise to social and political unrest.” To outwardly make not of this possibility would undo the State as a whole. For this reason, many portrayals of the poor showed them in a ‘fashionable’ light, where they still had some invisibility or were purposefully kept at a distance from the intended audience. This helped to reinforce the upper classes social standing because they still were able to control the way in which the poor were portrayed.
In the 1870s, there was a change to the work of some artists, most notably Luke Fildes, known for his famous Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874). It was based on a similar engraving that featured in The Graphic newspaper, which encourage artists to capture real life, especially if it helped make poverty a public rather than private concern. The idea for the painting came from the experiences Fildes had when he first moved to London, and in his own words he described how he would never “forget seeing somewhere near the Portland Road snowy winter’s night the applicants for the admission to a casual ward”. It purposefully painting showed the different types of people who were reliant on this new form of indoor relief by showing the darkness that a life in poverty created. Art critics had a mixed response to the painting. Some believed that it was “the most notable piece of realism” showing “the startling impression off all wayward and unlovely reality” but others saw it as “revolting for an art which should seek to please, refine and elevate” the poor in the eyes of others. Fildes used this painting as a protest against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which stopped all outdoor relief and centred the relief of the poor only within the workhouse. In terms of the painting, it is a direct condemnation of the indignity many poor had to go through to get help. They would first have to report to a police station in order to gain a night ticket for the workhouse, as seen by the policeman in the far left who is talking to a gentleman who looks like a lost ‘explorer’ of the slum. The people who did manage to get some help were often called the ‘undeserving’ poor, so called as they had to prove they were deserving of relief offered by the parish.
The ’undeserving’ poor were not allowed help as they were classed as undeserving and were left to fend for themselves. A main category of this type of poverty depicted in art at the time was the fallen woman, a woman who prostituted herself. The image of the fallen woman came to represent the idea of sexual immorality that the middle class believed was rife within the working classes. Female weakness within Victorian art was seen as a way of showing some compassion but not enough to put off a middle-class audience. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, used his unfinished painting Found (c.1869), to represent the prostitution that Dickens and Mayhew had already debated about in their writings. The painting depicts a rural man encountering an old lover who had moved to the city and has now become a prostitute. Urbanisation and industrialisation are seen as the reason for her moral ‘affliction’ and is purposefully compared with the righteousness of her rural lover. The loss of rural innocence and her possible fate is symbolised in the calf that has come into the city from a rural life only to be led to slaughter. Women who did not conform to middle class feminine ideals were used by artists because it was able to create more distance between the audience and the poor they depicted. Distance was also created by the frozen sense of drama which Lamborne indicates was a key feature of paintings depicting fallen women.
In contrast to the fallen woman being used metaphorically for the wrongs of the working poor, the masculinity of the labouring man was the metaphor for how the city was able to improve people’s spiritual life. Ford Madox Brown (another Pre-Raphaelite artist) was able to portray moral concerns surrounding the poor in Work, one of the most famous paintings of the Victorian age.Even Brown himself suggested the inspiration for the painting was his belief that labourers were “at least as worthy of the powers of an English painter as the fisherman of the Adriatic, the peasant of the Campagna or the Neapolitan lassarone”, because they were still working, even they were the lowest in society. The navvies who do the main and physical work are seen as heroes who bask in light whereas the aristocracy are in the dark background as they do not participate in work. The street urchin girl at the front also shows a feminine ideal of work as she shows a motherly persona towards her siblings but the red colour of her dress and her exposed shoulders subtly indicate that she has the signs of a future prostitute.
Despite the good intensions of Social Realism, it was never fashionable as the middle class were the main buyers of art, meaning those depicted would have represented their work force. For this reason, they were not interested in the pity created in the paintings, for the people in them were their capital. Despite the artists hoping to create a realistic portrayal of the poor, the Victorian poor, sentimentality did play a role. With the middle-class audience in mind, an altered image was needed to create a hidden message of social realism. This came in two forms: the idea of the fallen woman, who appealed to the middle class because it did not conform to their feminine ideals, thus distance was created between themselves and the model within the painting; the masculinity of the working poor could also appeal to the middle class connection with work and moral improvement. There also would have been those who purposefully wanted to turn a blind eye, so having a painting of the poor would have been just too close to home for some.
Paxman, J., The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age (London: BBC Books, 2009), p. 68; Des Cars, L., The Pre-Raphaelites: Romance and Realism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 49.
Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 63.
Flint, K., The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 156.
D’Arcy Wood, G., ‘Visual Pleasures, Visual States: Art, Entertainment, and the Nation’ in Klancher, J. (ed), A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 246; Pulham, P., ‘The Arts’ in Williams, C. (ed), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) p. 449.
Flint, K., The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, pp. 152-153.
Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 66; Korda, A., Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869-1891 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), p. 93.
Fildes cited in Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 69.
Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 78.
Art Journal, July 1874 cited in Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 70.
Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 68.
Des Cars, L., The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 52.
Des Cars, L., The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 52.
Des Cars, L., The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 52; Baringer, T., Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, Second Edition(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 109.
Baringer, T., Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 109.
Lamborne, L., Victorian Painting (London: Phiadon Press Limited, 1999), pulp. 375.
Ford Madox Brown cited in Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 81.
Baringer, T., Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, pp. 113-114.
Baringer, T., Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 115.
Paxman, J., The Victorians, p. 72; Pulham, P., ‘The Arts’, p. 450.
Korda, A., Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London, p. 94; Baringer, T., Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 18.
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