The Sale of a Heart, 1857. Oil on canvas, 45 x 29 inches (114.3 X 73.7 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Fine Art Restoration Company, London. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
This painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1857 with this inscription included in the catalogue “I deliver this as my act and deed.” In Victorian days these words were used when signing a legal instrument. Immediately following signing, the party would touch the seal and declare, “I deliver this as my act and deed.” The painting shows a young woman having just signed such a document, likely a marriage settlement, overlooked by an older man who is probably her father, while a young man, likely her husband to be, stands behind. The lawyer who drew up the legal marriage settlement hands the younger man a quill pen by for him to sign in turn. It certainly appears that the young woman is marrying for money and position and not for love. Prominently displayed on the floor in the right foreground is a scroll that is titled “Draft of the Settlement.” What Halliday really thought of the arrangement, however, is made clear by the title of the document the woman has just signed entitled “This Indenture.” The father pulls her close to him with one hand while the other presses down on her fingers, thus providing a perfect visual symbol of the Victorian legal doctrine of coverture. Under the law of coverture a woman's legal rights were subsumed by her husband's after the marriage. Legally, a husband and wife became one person, the husband. The father has obviously pressured the young woman into a lovelesss marriage purely for pecuniary interests.
The Sale of a Heart, in other words, is Halliday’s Victorian version of the first painting the William Hogarth’s series, Marriage à la Mode. Like Hogarth’s work, Halliday fills his canvas with significant details, such as the fallen, dying flowers that stand out against the woman’s skirt. The pansy flowers trampled at the young woman’s feet were likely included for symbolic purposes because the pansy is a flower with deep symbolic meaning. The most common meaning attached to these flowers is that of love. Perhaps the pansy flowers so carelessly discarded symbolize how the woman has forsaken her true love. Was this Halliday’s purpose in including a snowy winter scene containing a young man leaving the house and apparently suffering from the cold? Is this the young woman’s true love who has been left literally and figuratively “out in the cold”? Halliday’s painting may also have been inspired by J. E. Millais’s well-known series of three pen-and-ink drawings Married for Love, Married for Money, and Married for Rank produced between 1853-54.
Like many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, The Sale of a Heart takes the form of claustrophobic scene only relieved by a window or other opening. What does Halliday intend by including a snowy winter scene containing a man leaving the house and apparently suffering from the cold? Is this the young woman’s real love who is literally and figuratively “out in the cold"? The pansy flowers trampled at the young woman’s feet were likely included for symbolic purposes because the pansy is a flower with deep symbolic meaning. The most common meaning attached these flowers is that of love. Perhaps the pansy flowers so carelessly discarded symbolize how the woman has forsaken her true love for monetary reasons.
Questions
1. Is the old man with his arm around the young woman her father or the bridegroom? If the bridegroom who is the younger man standing behind him?
2. What is the lawyer or notary passing to the young man??
The Color Mauve — a Victorian Invention
The mauve skirt the young woman wears and the purple ribbon draped around her right shoulder is reminiscent of the purple skirt the young woman is wearing in Arthur Hughes’s April Love, shown at the Royal Academy the year previously in 1856. These colours were made possible by the recent introduction of new aniline dyes. The first was “Perkins mauve”, followed by a variety of shades of purples and magentas that allowed for much more intense colours than were available from natural dyes.
Links to Details of the Painting and Material Related to It
- Documents lower right and fallen flowers
- This Indenture
- View through window with apparently cold man
- William Hogarth’s. Marriage à la Mode 1. [Arranging the marriage].
- Sir William Henry Perkin and the Coal-Tar Colours
Last modified 21 February 2022