3-008-499 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Return of the Lost Sailor", by T. Roberts, in the Exhibition of the Society of British Artists, 1862. Engraving of a painting. 'The story is simply that a sailor has been away from home so long that his wife, despairing of his return, has assumed the widow's weeds, and at his unlooked-for apparition swoons, almost with the rapture of recognition...The few accessories introduced are, however, significant - the widow's cap, fallen off by accident in the embrace, but not to be replaced; the little child's toy-boat on the floor; the glimpse of seashore through the half-opened cottage door, and the inscription on this door suggesting by the word "needlewoman" the struggle of the young mother to support herself and child, and the long weary days and nights she has plied her needle with the sickness at heart of "hope deferred," and the thousand vampire tricks fancy will play brooding on uncertainty...Mr. Roberts has appended in the catalogue the following sentence, giving it as a quotation, in which the wife is assumed to speak and using it as a sort of text or legend: "Yes! there he was in bodily flesh and blood: thin, sallow, bearded to the eyes, in his rigged sailor's clothes; but - himself".' From "Illustrated London News", 1862.