Terms and conditions of use
Widowed
1879
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 84.3 × 115.0 cm
- Inscription
- inscribed in black paint l.l.: Frank.Holl 1879. (ank.Hol underlined)
- Accession Number
- 4466-3
- Department
- International Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1931
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- 19th Century European Paintings Gallery
Level 2, NGV International - About this work
-
Throughout the 1870s Frank Holl specialised in painting grieving widows, mothers lamenting the deaths of infants, and grimly realistic funeral corteges. These dour images struck a chord with late Victorian audiences, who identified with and shared the grief of Queen Victoria whom for forty years mourned the loss of her beloved husband Prince Albert. This work was first exhibited in 1880, when The Art Journal wrote that Widowed, ‘showing a poor woman burying her head despairingly in her arm, which rests on the table, while her little girl looks on in wonder and sympathy, is one of the strongest of Mr Holl’s many pictures’.
- Subjects (general)
- Emotions and Mental States Human Figures Relationships and Interactions
- Subjects (specific)
- children (people by age group) crying (weeping) deaths girls grief mothers widows women (female humans)
- Provenance
-
With Arthur Tooth & Sons (dealer), London, 1879; exhibited Winter Exhibition, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Fine Art Galleries, Haymarket, 1879, no. 113; collection of Abraham and Joseph Mitchell, Bowling Park, Bradford, West Yorkshire, before 1901; included in their sale, Christie's, London, 1 April 1905, no. 54 (withdrawn); by descent to Herbert Mitchell (son of Abraham), Bradford, until 1930; from whom purchased on the advice of Randall Davies, for the Felton Bequest, 1930.
Exhibited Winter exhibition, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Fine Art Galleries, Haymarket, 1880, no. 113; Bradford Fine Art and Technical Exhibition, Bradford, 1882, no. 158, owner Abraham Mitchell; Subject Pictures, National Gallery of Victoria travelling exhibition, 1954, no. 12; Victorian Social Conscience, AGNSW, Sydney, 1976, no. 34; The First Fifty Years: 19th Century British Art from the Gallery Archives, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1922, no. 11; Hidden Treasures, David Jones’ Art Gallery, Sydney, 1992.
