Emily Mary Osborn - Nameless and Friendless, 1857

      "Osborn's most famous work is Nameless and Friendless, which has been called "The most ingenious of all Victorian widow pictures." It depicts a recently bereaved woman attempting to make a living as an artist by offering a picture to a dealer, while two "swells" at the left ogle her. The creation of this piece was a product of its time. In the 1850s there was an influx of middle-class women into the urban environment of London. Women began more freely to occupy the streets and travel the city. They would walk the streets, take public transportation, etc. This opened opportunities for women but also introduced new social dynamics and there were many debates about this new dynamic and way of urban life.

      The young woman is caught in the multiple gazes of the men around her. The setting appears to be the West End, where Cherry says "the legitimate and the obscene are on sale side-by-side". One of the seated male figures is holding a print with a scantily-clad dancer while the other man sitting next to him looks at the young woman in the centre of the painting instead, indicating that the male gaze is sexual in nature and that in the urban landscape where women walk freely, they are still sexualized by the gazes of the men on the streets who can see them. Cherry says that "the gaze of the male customers – which possesses space and simultaneously captures image and body – signifies the hazards of sexual harassment for a respectable working woman in the highly charged and ambivalent spaces of modem London. And it returns us to the mutuality of bodies and space, ocularity and corporeality."

                           in, Wikipedia