Where is the heroine of Walker's film "Lost on the Path"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Walker's painting gained particular popularity after the 2016 exhibition "Fallen Woman", which was held at the London Foundling Hospital. The painting became the cover for the exhibition guidebook. Walker's work even became a meme (an instantly recognizable image in political and humorous cartoons). Of course, the reality of the situation that Walker drew was hardly a reason for humor, because the plot concerned abandoned children and women.

About the artist

Frederick Walker was born in London on May 26, 1840, the son of the goldsmith William Walker. His father died when he was still a child. Therefore, the only breadwinner for the seven children was the mother, who was the embroiderer. After completing his elementary education at North London University School in Camden Town, Walker took a job as an assistant architect. From an early age, Walker loved to paint. In 1858 he became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. In parallel, the young man worked as an illustration designer for Josiah Wood Whimper in Lambeth.

In 1859, he enrolled in the Langham Society of Artists, a club where young artists worked together on the same theme and then compared their results. In the same year, his prints began to appear in magazines including Good Words, Once a Week, and Everybody's Journal.

In 1860, William Makepeace Thackeray began using Walker's illustrations for his new Cornhill Magazine, including illustrations for Thackeray's The Adventures of Philip.

Frederick Walker's liking was difficult. Shy, reserved, and sensitive, he did not want or perhaps could not talk about his art with others. Walker was very nervous and took any criticism sharply. On the other hand, Walker could be energetic and cheerful. The painter was friends with a number of influential Victorian artists, including Everett Millais, who painted Walker's beloved cat, Eagle Eye, in his work Flood.

British historian Walter Armstrong wrote: “Apart from art, there were no events in Walker's life. He never married and lived with his cousin John and his sister Fanny. And although Walker did not have a wife and children, he managed to create a deep work dedicated to the tragedy of a family and an abandoned woman.

About the painting "Lost on the Path"

Lost Her Way is the first oil painting to be painted and exhibited at the Royal Academy by Frederick Walker. Walker's painting depicts a respectable woman. During the Victorian era, it was argued that if women deviated from the social norms of marriage, motherhood and family life, they faced a number of negative consequences, including prostitution, illness and early death, which were almost inevitable.

Writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell described the plight of a fallen woman years before Walker called society to general sympathy with his canvas. Although these writers made readers sympathize with the fallen women, they still presented them as "forever infected." They were shunned and excluded from society.

Walker's heroine is not dressed for the weather at all. Her thin cape and light hat do nothing to keep her out of the cold. In the picture, the woman is not just lost in the snow. According to the conservative views of the time, this unmarried mother must have followed the path of immorality. She was caught in a blizzard, which turned her path into a continuous snow drift. She has a sleeping baby in her arms, wrapped in a shawl. Her semi-conspicuous face, to which she tightly presses the precious treasure, demonstrates her courage in the struggle for her life and her child. Delicate and airy palette of colors emphasize the fragility of a woman and her baby

This is not just a woman in a blizzard. This is Walker's masterful demonstration of the moment when a fallen woman as a social outcast crosses the border. In this case, it is the border between life and death. She is in many ways a borderline figure, a woman "on the brink" who, having gone astray, deviated from the path of virtue and is now doubly lost. These women find themselves expelled from home and family, exposed in the snow on the street, like Walker's heroine.

Where is the heroine going?

It is likely that the unhappy mother wants to go to the Orphanage and leave her baby there until she can pick him up and provide for herself. In the Victorian era, the Foundling Home was an orphanage for foundlings. He enjoyed immense popularity. There women brought their children, they gave birth without a husband and did not have the means of subsistence and support for their children. So that after many years the mother could recognize and take her baby, she left identification marks in the baby's things. It could be, for example, an embroidered heart with the written names of the mother and child. Or any other attribute.

Frederick Walker is the most prominent contemporary example of how an artist achieved beauty and unity through blind submission to his own instincts and emotions. His only purpose in life was to realize his own ideas and express his emotions. Walker's art was so new and attractive that it certainly influenced a galaxy of young masters. By the age of 30, Walker had mastered his talent in three areas of art - as a wood designer, as a watercolor painter and as an oil painter. And this can only be done by a real genius.