“The Lost Path” (1863) by Frederick Walker, ARA (1840-1875)

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The Lost Path

Frederick Walker, ARA (1840-1875)

1863

Oil on canvas

7½ x 5¼ in. (9.1 x 13.3 cm.)

Signed with initials "F. W." in the lower right-hand corner

Source: Foundling Museum’s Fallen Woman Exhibition

Illustration in Good Words

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND

Commentary: Walker's Picture and The Fallen Woman

The organizers of The Fallen Woman, the 2015-2016 exhibition at London's Foundling Hospital that included works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frank Holl, George Frederick Watts, and Emma Brownlow, appropriately used The Lost Path for the cover of the exhibition guide. This work’s image, if not the painting itself, has become so well-known that it has become so commonplace that, like the figure of a castaway on an island with a single palm tree, it has become a meme or instantly recognizable image often used in political and humorous cartoons. Of course, the reality of the situation Walker painted was hardly a matter for humor, because as Lynda Nead, the organizer of the exhibition explains,

the narratives of these images share many elements of the stories in the Foundling petitions; they depict respectable women who ‘fall’ because they are out in the city, lose their money or family homes and are abandoned by the fathers of their babies. If women departed from the social norms of marriage, motherhood and domestic life, it was claimed, they became exposed to a series of consequences, including prostitution, disease and an early death, that was almost inescapable. The details of the myth of the fallen woman were repeated continuously in Victorian culture and audiences became skilled in reading the stories told by details, symbols and references in the pictures. ["Foreword," p. 3]

According to the organizers of the exhibition, Walker has a socially significant point to communicate: the wanderer in the blizzard has not merely lost her way in the snow; rather, according to the conservative attitudes of the time, this unwed mother has lost her moral compass. These, then, Walker attacks through both the painting and the earlier engraving, which has the alternate title Love in Death. Novelists as different as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell had described plight of the Fallen Woman some years before Walker made his plea for general sympathy. As Margaret Reynolds points out in the guide for the exhibition, although these novelists made readers sympathize with these fallen women, they still presented them as “forever contaminated”: “So while Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth lives a selfless life, once rescued from her seducer, or Lady Dedlockgraces the highest echelons of society after her indiscretion, they are both forever contaminated, and they both have to die – Ruth of a fever caught while innocently nursing her erstwhile lover, and Lady Dedlock wandering the streets and finally clinging to the gates of the city cemetery, filthy with corruption, where the father of her child is buried” (p. 11).

Some modern scholars, including the organizers of the exhibition, assume that Walker portrays the fate of a fallen woman. Apparently not all earlier critics would have agreed. For example, Claude Phillips, who considered the later version of The Lost Path Walker's "first important essay in oils" (23) apparently does not see the painting as a representation of an unmarried mother. The critic recalls without comment a remark by one who had confused or conflated the exhibited painting with the original engraving, which he ascribed to a Mr. "Waltner," and then continues, “the design is one of the most convincing, one of the most concise and natural in strength that Walker ever produced. A woman caught in a snowstorm, which has made of the cross-country path a trackless drift, presses on swiftly, holding her sleeping child wrapped from harm in her shawl; her half-seen face, as she closely presses the precious burden to her bosom, shows courage to fight for life, yet but little hope” (23-24).

The organizers of The Fallen Woman, however, see the painting within a narrative of "Passion: Its beginning and Its ending,” interpreting it as portraying a liminal moment in which the fallen woman as social outcast crosses a boundary, in this case, the border between life and death. She is very much, as Reynolds remarks, a liminal figure, woman "on the brink" who, having been led astray, in wandering has deviated forever from the straight and narrow pathway of virtue, and is now doubly "lost": "La Traviata literally means the woman 'across, or beyond, the path'. Then, consequent to the 'fall, such women are presented out of doors, friendless, in the snow, negotiating 'the slippery slope', 'outcast' or 'castaway' from home and family, walking the streets" (Reynolds, 11). Unlike Richard Redgrave’s The Outcast (1851), a well known Victorian painting that depicts a woman with a child driven out of the family home, The Lost Path remains intriguingly ambiguous. Is the woman in the snowstorm chiefly a victim of man or a victim of crul, indifferent nature? — George P. Landow and Philip Allingham.

Related Material

Bibliography

Phillips, Claude. Fred Walker and His Works. London: Seeley & Co., 1894, rpt. 1905.

Nead, Lynda. "Foreword – The Fallen Woman." The Fallen Woman. Online version available from foundlingmuseum.org.uk. Web. 14 July 2018.

Reynolds, Margaret. "Fallen Women and the Great Social Evil in Victorian Literature and Culture." The Fallen Woman, 25 September 2015 - 3 January 2016. Online version available from foundlingmuseum.org.uk. Web. 14 July 2018. 9-13.

Walker, Frederick. "The Lost Path." Good Words (January 1862), rpt. in Gleeson White's English Illustration — The Sixties: 1855-70. London: Archibald Constable, 1906. Online version available from wikimedia.org. Web. 14 July 2018.

Last modified 27 July 2018