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Commentary by Pamela Gerrish Nunn

This work was one of the forty-five exhibits shown in the artist's first solo exhibition at the Dowdeswell Galleries in June 1901: one can assume that, being no. 3, it contributed to a visitor's first impression of the show. It does, indeed, represent well the artist's chief concerns at that time.

The composition's principal figure is a young woman in a beseeching pose, holding closely in her arms a tiny baby. Moving diagonally through the close-packed picture-space from bottom left to top right, she is attempting to mount the steps leading to an open door, on whose threshold an all-but-invisible figure stands. While we see only a sliver of the front of this figure's floor-length robe and the hands clasped at their waist, the viewer imagines them looking down on the supplicant to whom they have opened their door. Standing at the extreme left, holding open this heavy wooden door and observing intently what is passing before him, is a figure generally taken by viewers at the time to represent Jesus Christ.

The work's title, An Opportunity, refers to the least prominent of these three figures, insofar as it is this one to whom the situation offers 'an opportunity' to do good, to behave with Christian charity and take in this unfortunate descendant of that mid-Victorian cliché, the fallen woman. The latter's dress and hairstyle facilitate viewers making this connection with earlier visual images of the unmarried mother – the denounced daughter in Richard Redgrave's The Outcast (1851) and the destitute adulterous wife in the final episode of Augustus Egg's (so-called) Past and Present (1858) come most readily to mind. At the same time, the setting otherwise projects an historical character, indicating that the act of giving shelter to the needy is both a necessity of present-day society and the long-established practice of an honourable tradition.

Left: Richard Redgrave's The Outcast (1851). Right: William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World (1854).

The piety of this sentiment is completely genuine and reflects the artist's own faith, which was manifested in several other works in the exhibition: If I say, peradventure..., Hymn of Labour, I have married a Wife. This ingenuous and, perhaps to twenty-first-century viewer's, naive profession of belief in art's capacity for moral teaching was to remain embedded within Fortescue-Brickdale's practice. In this, it is legitimate to see the example of G. F. Watts at work, despite the fact that he did not deploy the signs and symbols of Christianity in his idealistic paintings. Thinking particularly of the depiction of Jesus Christ, which may now seem gauche, and the stuff of Sunday school Bibles, another artist whose example may well have been in Fortescue-Brickdale's mind is William Holman Hunt. His The Light of the World (1854) was once more in the news in 1895, when it was installed in a chapel at Keble College, Oxford, devised especially to showcase the painting.

Although this function for fine art was the polar opposite of the modern idea, that it still found favour with many at the time is indicated by the considerable volume of publications in the first decade of the new century dedicated to religious art (for which read Christian art) of the past and present; and by the enthusiasm and loyalty of the patrons Fortescue-Brickdale acquired at this time: this work, for instance, was purchased from the exhibition by a family that went on to acquire many characteristic works by Fortescue-Brickdale and is treasured by them to this day.

Links to related material

• A Pre-Raphaelite Journey. The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
• Fallen Women in Victorian Art

Bibliography

[Source of illustration] Sparrow, Walter Shaw. "On Some Water-colour pictures by Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale." The Studio [London]. 23 (June 1901): 37. Internet Archive. Web. 27 February 2012.

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Created 26 February 2012
Commentary added 14 October 2022