Bride and prejudice

Leighton House, Lord Leighton’s home and studio in Kensington, has a growing reputation for small and scholarly yet undaunting exhibitions. And with the house itself and its collection to be relished into the bargain, size hardly matters. That said, the current special offer, occupying only one room, is centred upon a single work that, at 10 feet by more than five, is itself pretty big. Indeed ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ is one of the great machines of high Victorian narrative art.

Its painter Edwin Long, born in 1829, was already in his mid-40s and at the time not even an Associate RA. And this one work, two years in the painting and the sensation of the Royal Academy Summer Show of 1875, was to make his name and fortune. Said to have been commissioned for 1,700 guineas (about £134,000 today) by the cotton magnate Edward Hermon, when it came up for sale at Christie’s in 1882, in the sale of his collection after his death, it made 6,300 guineas, the then saleroom record for a work by a living artist. Bought by the pill millionaire Thomas Holloway, it has remained in the collection of the Royal Holloway College at Egham ever since.

To look at it now is hardly to be surprised at the sensation it caused. It takes its subject from the account in Herodotus of the marriage customs of the Assyrians. Put bluntly, each year the marriageable girls of town or village were auctioned off in turn as prospective brides. This was done, as it were, from the top down, with the most beautiful offered first, and so on, to the point where the plainer girls were reached, when the bidding principle shifted into reverse.