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Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. On April 10, 1955, in front of witnesses, she shot and killed her lover, David Blakely, and was immediately arrested and imprisoned. In so many other ways, however, her life was similar to those of many aspirational women of the working classes in postwar Britain; she achieved notoriety because of the murder and execution. This essay uses archives of press photography to examine the diverse ways in which Ellis constructed her identity and was represented to the public as a sexualized woman. It attempts a feminist encounter with the visual archive—an encounter not only with an individual woman but also, and as importantly, with 1950s sex, sexuality, class, and violence.

The publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality had an enormous impact on the shaping of research in the humanities and social sciences. For those working on the cultural history of the Victorian period, Foucault's writing opened up new ways of understanding the formation of gender and sexual identities and of working with a wide range of archival and primary material. The sexual politics of the nineteenth century were filtered through the sexual politics of the late twentieth century and methodologies were developed that allowed these connections to be explored as fully as possible. In recent years there has been a return to the history of sexuality in relation to the expanding field of gender and sexual history, but certain questions remain as pressing as they were in the 1970s and 1980s. Using archival material drawn upon for a recent exhibition called ‘The Fallen Woman’ at the Foundling Museum, London, this piece returns to the core questions of identity and agency, sexuality, gender and class to explore how women narrated their sexual lives in the nineteenth century and negotiated the power of philanthropic institutions in this period.

The annals of art history can readily be reduced to a catalogue of names, but salient examples of group effort are never hard to find. In London, the example of the Independent Group (IG) need only be adduced, but its immediate successors are less obvious. Between the dissolution of the IG in 1956 and the founding of Art & Language (A&L) a decade later, there appeared one far less heralded alliance, its subsequent obscurity balanced by its remarkable prescience. Terry Atkinson, later an A&L founder, had earlier been instrumental in creating a collective artistic entity among fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art—Roger Jeffs, Bernard Jennings, and John Bowstead—who called themselves the Fine-Artz Associates. By the time of the 1964 Young Contemporaries exhibition, the four submitted their work under this name alone, but their ambitions had already expanded beyond the studio into the orbit of radically more extensive collectives.

The Secret of England's Greatness is a portrait by Thomas Jones Barker of Queen Victoria meeting an African envoy and presenting him with a copy of the Bible. Painted around 1863, it has become an icon of British imperialism in this period and of the justification of colonial expansion in terms of the transmission of the values of the Bible. As such, the portrait appears confident and unambiguous: the secret of England's greatness is unravelled and the truth is exposed. This article seeks to disturb the apparent absence of mystery in this painted encounter and to examine what remains concealed in the meeting between the white sovereign and the black emissary. Moving from Barker's painting to William Mulready's The Toyseller, which was completed in the same years and depicts a black pedlar trying to sell a wooden toy to a white mother and child, the article uncovers, within the language of painting and its surrounding discourses, a different kind of disturbing and exhilarating secret, concerned with racial identity and mid-Victorian desire. Working from a reading of the surface of the paintings to related representations of blackness in nineteenth-century science and culture, the article considers how The Toyseller negotiates the proximity of the figures of the black pedlar and the white mother and child and the significance of the compositional gap between them and suggests that Mulready's painting visualizes many of the issues that were at the heart of British imperialism in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of slavery.

‘A cutman kneels beside the fighter … [he] works quickly… He knows the fighter wants to be anywhere but here, seen like this. It’s more than blood pouring onto the canvas. It’s pride, ego, hope. The cutman’s job is to keep these things out of the puddle forming between them’ (Jones 2008). Boxing is arguably one of the most visually arresting of sports, its history punctuated with intense, expressive images. This paper examines one category of boxing picture, the photograph of the wounded boxer with a cut, open and bleeding, above his eye. As in the classical legend of the warrior Achilles, the cut above the eye is the boxer’s deadly weakness, the single point of vulnerability in the otherwise ideal, hardened masculine body. The cut, with its spongy tissue and flowing blood, opens up the otherwise contained and contoured body, it represents a soft, feminised man, rather than the male body as metal tool. These themes recall Klaus Theweleit’s ‘Male Fantasies’ (1987), a psychoanalytic account of the violence ...

In March 1863, on the occasion of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, the Penny Illustrated Paper described the behaviour of the crowds who were packed on to the st...

In the years following the end of the Second World War and the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act, the language of color was gradually and steadily harnessed to ideologies of race and nation, as chromatic hue and skin color became utterly imbricated. The relationship between the colors of clothing and skin are explored first through discussion of the naming and standardization of colors from the 1930s to the 1950s by the British Colour Council before turning to an analysis of the 1959 British Film, Sapphire, and its construction of racial identities through the semantics of hue, dress and appearance. These ideas were disseminated not only through visual culture, but also through the expertise of social scientists and in journalism, popular psychology, and many forms of visual media. Choice of clothing styles and colors was believed to expose innate racial traits and preferences, defining both the restrained, neutral look of the white nation and the sexualized and dangerous excesses of the new black African and Caribbean immigrants.

Boxing is arguably one of the most visually arresting of sports; its images as potent and corporeal as the sport itself. This paper focuses on one category of boxing picture, the photograph of a head punch – the image taken at the moment when the gloved fist of a boxer makes contact with the opponent’s face. Features distorted by the force of the blow, the head recoiled with its weight and power, the image is both fascinating and repulsive. To understand the aesthetics of this genre of boxing image is to comprehend some of the most fundamental questions concerning the pleasures and horrors of visual representation. To gaze at the stilled moment of this attack on the face is to reflect on the complex historical relationship between violence and the photographic image

This article considers the relationship between the picture as historical document and as aesthetic experience. Pictures, it is suggested, are more than passive conveyors of visual evidence; they do not reflect other forms of historical experience and representation but actively work on and may alter those structures. The pleasures of the image should be recognized as a fundamental quality of this particular form of historical evidence.

Early films created new representations of the sexualised body and provided new opportunities for erotic viewing. Focussing on the 1896 film, A Victorian Lady in her Boudoir, this articles analyses...

In a recent conversation with Bruno Latour, the French philosopher Michel Serres visualized his concept of modernity through the image of the automobile. The car, Serres argued, could not be defined as uniquely of one period or as belonging exclusively to the modern, being ‘a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods … The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage.’ This metaphor offers a highly productive way of looking at the history and forms of visual culture in Britain in the early twentieth century, when the technological and commercial possibilities of nineteenth-century optical developments were filtering into all aspects of cultural production and consumption. The article examines this moment via a case study of the artist Hubert von Herkomer; offering a reassessment through an examination of his paintings, films and fast cars and thereby proposing a reframing of the history of British visual culture through the integration of still and moving images.

In 1857 the first Obscene Publications Act was passed in Britain. In the months leading up to the passing of this legislation, a debate emerged which focused on the spaces of the modern metropolis, the production of modern forms of visual culture, and the possibility of transgressive forms of cultural consumption. One street in London became the symbol for this definition of obscenity—Holywell Street in Westminster, which ran parallel to the Strand from St Clement Danes to St Mary-le-Strand. The narrow contours and crumbling buildings of this Elizabethan alley signified physical, moral, and cultural impurity, in contrast to the modernising ambitions of the city in this period. The display of obscene images in the shop windows enabled a new form of cultural consumption based on looking while moving through the street. As such, it represented a dangerous promiscuity which could address women and men of all classes as they moved through the spaces of the metropolis.

(1996). Sexuality, Modernity and the Victorians. Journal of Victorian Culture: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 118-130.

There was once a young, penniless painter who wished to visit the studio of a great court artist to see and learn from his work. It was winter, in 1612, and the studio was located in the Rue des GrandsAugustins, in Paris. The poor young artist, whose name was Nicolas Poussin, was too shy to introduce himself but finally gained entry by following another visitor, an enigmatic old man, like a figure from a canvas by Rembrandt. In the sanctuary of Master Porbus' studio, the three men gathered round a canvas of Saint Mary the Egyptian and began to argue about how to achieve the perfect visual representation of reality how to paint a woman so that she appeared to live and breathe. The mysterious old visitor, Frenhofer by name, grabbed a palette and brushes and, with a few strokes, seemed to invest the portrait of the saint with new life. As he painted he seemed possessed, demonic, attacking the canvas, or so the story goes, with the passion and energy of a lover. Filled with admiration for the old painter's skills, Porbus and Poussin went with him to his house

Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 by Marcia Pointon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 160 pp., 48 b. & w. illus., £35

The evidence given by Kenneth Clark, one of the world's leading art historians, to Lord Longford's committee on pornography in Britain, in 1972 is just one fragment of a vast body of discourses that has been produced on the subject of pornography over the last few decades.' The Longford committee was a privately sponsored investigation that claimed to represent public opinion. Its report, published in the form of a mass-market paperback and launched in a blaze of publicity, fueled the pornography debate in Britain in the 1970s. From the seventies onward, feminists, moral crusaders, governments, and various other pressure groups have presented their views on the issue, with the result that pornography has become one of the most fiercely and publicly contested areas within contemporary cultural production.2

List of Plates Introduction Part One: Theorizing the Female Nude 1. Framing the Female Body 2. A Discourse on the Naked and the Nude 3. A Study of Ideal Art 4. Aesthetics and the Female Nude 5. Obscenity and the Sublime Part Two: Redrawing the Lines 1. 'The Damaged Venus' 2. The Framework of Tradition 3. The Lessons of the Life Class 4. Art Criticism and Sexual Metaphor 5. Breaking Open the Boundaries 6. Redrawing the Lines Part Three: Cultural Distinctions 1. Sacred Frontiers 2. Pure and Motivated Pleasure 3. Policing the Boundaries 4. Displaying the Female Body 5. Erotic Art: A Frame for Desire List of Works Cited Index