Nameless and Friendless

Emily Mary Osborn (1828 – 1925), was an English painter of the Victorian era. She was born in Essex, the eldest of nine children of a clergyman. She was educated at Dickinson's Academy in London. In 1851, at the age of seventeen, Osborn began showing her work in the annual Royal Academy exhibits, and continued to do so over a span of four decades (to 1893). She was best known for her pictures of children and her genre paintings, especially on themes of women in distress.

Her most famous single work is Nameless and Friendless (1857), which has been called "The most ingenious of all Victorian widow pictures." It depicts a recently bereaved woman attempting to make a living as an artist by offering a picture to a dealer, while two "swells" at the left ogle her. Osborn's The Governess was shown at the Royal Academy in 1860, and purchased by Queen Victoria. Works of this type, which focused on the distresses of women in contemporary Victorian society, have earned Osborn the designation "proto-feminist artist."

In 1861 Osborn exhibited her The escape of Lord Nithisdale from the Tower, 1717 at the Royal Academy. This historical painting shows Nithisdale eluding custody by dressing as a woman. Osborn's interest in women and women artists is encapsulated in her 1884 picture Portrait of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, in which feminist artist Barbara Bodichon was portrayed at her easel. Osborn executed a second portrait of Bodichon in 1888.

In 1914 Ellen Sickert (daughter of Richard Cobden and first wife of Walter Sickert), writing under the pseudonym "Miles Amber," published her novel Sylvia Saxton: Episodes of a Life. Sickert dedicated her novel to Osborn and her companion Mary Elizabeth Dunn.