Emily Mary Osborn was born in Essex in 1834. She was the eldest of nine children of a clergyman. The family moved to London in 1848 and Emily studied first at Mr Dickinson’s Academy in Maddox Street, London, and also received private tuition from the portrait painter James Leigh (1808-60). It has also been suggested that she studied in Munich, a common enough destination for English artists. She first exhibited at the RA in 1851, at the age of 17. Although her first paid work was in portraiture, she later became best known for genre subjects with a sentimental or didactic appeal. Between 1852 and 1856 she submitted a few entries to the British Institution in Pall Mall and from the late 1850s until the late 1870s, sporadically sent works to the Royal Society of British Artists. Her first triumph occurred in 1855, when her RA picture My Cottage Door (Royal Collection) was purchased by Queen Victoria. Osborn’s most celebrated work was Nameless and Friendless (1857; private collection), which has been called ‘The most ingenious of all Victorian widow pictures.’ As was the fashion of the time, the picture contained a number of clues that had to be deciphered by the viewer. It depicted a young female artist, and a little boy who is presumably her younger brother, standing in a picture-dealer’s shop. The woman in widow’s weeds evidently depends on her artistic abilities to make her way in the world. In the shop, she is not invited to take a seat, a clear signal that she is of lowly social status, while her work is perused by the dealer, who holds her fate in his hands. At the same time, two ‘swells’ at the far left of the picture ogle her. All this made clear the precarious and vulnerable position of a working woman in Victorian England. The work was praised by numerous critics. Inspired by Charles Kingsley’s poem The Three Fishers, in 1859 Osborn showed her Presentiments at the RA. It depicted a fisherman leaving his cottage, looking back at this his seated wife and three young children. Despite the storm raging outside, he must go, in order to feed his family. The title of the painting warns the viewer that he will not be returning. This, in 1850s Britain, would have been a starkly realistic scene that would have been familiar to many. Osborn’s The Governess was shown at the RA in 1860. In that Victorian satire, members of a vulgar bourgeois family terrorise their gentle and ladylike governess. Her four young charges, who have evidently reported her to their mother, look on in mischievous glee, as she is upbraided for some supposed fault. With her simple black gown and proud, composed demeanour, the accused governess is entirely the innocent party, silhouetted against white curtains that symbolise purity. In contrast, her crass, fashionably dressed employer – perhaps the wife of a nouveau riche merchant – is the embodiment of an ill-judging parent with more money than sense, who indulges her children’s every whim and accepts unhesitatingly their account of this dispute. The contrast between the two women confirms the governess’s superiority in everything, but money and position. The composition is divided into two unequal vertical bands: on the left, the governess’s simple black dress and upright pose is juxtaposed to the gaudy colours and clutter to the right, where the family’s united attack on its forbearing employee is expressed in the serpentine line which links mother and children. The picture received the ultimate seal of approval by being purchased by Queen Victoria. Works of this type, which focused on oppressed womanhood in contemporary Victorian society, earned Osborn the designation of ‘proto-feminist artist.’ In 1861 she exhibited her sex farce The Escape of Lord Nithsdale from the Tower. That painting depicted Lord Nithsdale’s celebrated escape from the Tower of London in 1717 by dressing up in women’s clothing, brought to him by his mother the night before his execution. It has been suggested that Osborn’s conception was influenced by Millais’ earlier Order of Release (1853) which cleverly reversed the traditional Victoria formula by which men were depicted as strong and women as weak. Osborn’s interest in women and women artists’ was encapsulated in her painting Portrait of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1884; Girton College, Cambridge) in which that feminist artist was portrayed at her easel. Osborn executed a second portrait of Bodichon in 1888. Osborn would exhibit her work at the RA for a span of more than four decades. She died in 1913.