3-008-622 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Fugitive Royalists", by Miss Solomon, in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1862. Engraving of a painting. '...the exhibition this year is remarkable for the number of interesting and admirable pictures by lady artists...We doubtless shall shortly have more artists among the number of our female population now that lady students are admitted at the Royal Academy...A Royalist mother, with, perhaps, her fatherless boy, has fled in terror from her home...In her agonised anxiety - more for her son than herself - she has sought refuge in a house which, as we see, proves to belong to one of her dreaded enemies. The proprietor, however...is away from home...His wife...is here to receive the fugitives. What is she to do? If she conceals them her husband may accuse her of disloyalty...In her perplexity the poor Puritan mother looks at her own child, who is likewise menaced with danger; for it lies evidently very ill within its little cot...she cannot harden her heart to the poor fugitive's passionate intreaties. So she slides aside the portrait of her husband on the panel of the wainscoting which conceals a safe hiding-place; for such a refuge was often provided for the frequently-recurring emergencies of those troublous and insecure times'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.