Love and the Bachelor Maid

Though born in Philadelphia to a Quaker family, Anna Lea Merritt spent the majority of her life living and working in England after her family relocated to Europe from America when she was only 21 years old. She married Henry Merritt, an art critic and conservator, in 1877 when she was 33 years old and intended to give up her painting career after her wedding, but his death only a short three months later meant that Merritt would continue to ‘live by her brush’ and she became well-known for both her portraits and paintings of Victorian subjects. Her most famous work, Love Locked Out, painted in 1889, was painted in response to the untimely loss of her husband. Writing in her memoirs, the artist described the subject, Cupid attempting in vain to force open the door of a mausoleum, as ‘Love waiting for the door of death to open’ so that the ‘lonely pair’ might be reunited. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890, Love Locked Out became the first painting by a female artist acquired for the British national collection via the Chantrey Bequest, and is now in the collection of the Tate.
The present work depicts a young woman in an academic cap and gown, with a view of Oxford High Street, including the façade of The Queen’s College and the spire of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, visible behind her. Though caps and gowns in the United Sates are largely associated exclusively with graduation ceremonies, Oxford has a long history of requiring academic dress in a number of other contexts, so her attire does not necessarily indicate that she has yet graduated – indeed Oxford did not admit female students to degree granting programs until 1920, ten years after the present work was painted, though they were able to attend classes and lectures. In front of her is a large pile of books over which the figure of cupid – an arrow pulled from his quiver and held unused in his hand – looks up at her plaintively. The subject highlights the backwards preoccupations of many during the early years of the 20^th century as the Women’s Rights Movement began to accomplish its early goals – if women were free to have lives outside the home and undertake their own study and work, would it come at the expense of their romantic lives?
Love and the Bachelor Maid is slightly unusual within Merrit’s œuvre of predominantly portraits and religious themes. It may have been inspired by her friendship with the well-known suffragette and women’s education advocate Dorothea Beale LL.D. (1831-1906), who had commissioned Merritt to paint her portrait in 1893. Beale is best remembered as the influential early principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, as well as the founder of St. Hilda’s College, a teacher training college in Cheltenham and St. Hilda’s Hall in Oxford, a women’s college which is now St. Hilda’s College, a full constituent college of Oxford University. Merritt was so impressed by Beale she included a depiction of her in her commission for the decorations of the vestibule of the Women’s Building for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Taking ‘teaching’ as the subject of two of the four panels, Merritt included a depiction of, ‘Miss Beale, in a college cap and gown, presenting students for examination at London University’ in the final panel. The two would remain close friends for the rest of Beale’s life, and the artist’s connection with her might also resolve the confusion about the date of the present work in Merritt’s memoirs – she gives the date of 1906, the year of Beale’s death, instead of 1910, as the work was dated when painted.