Edwin Long

In 1875 a single painting sold for 6,605 pounds, the highest price a living artist's work had yet fetched in Britain. It was The Babylonian Marriage Market by Edwin Long, a wide, crowded scene of young women being auctioned as brides in the ancient Near East, lined up by looks, the prettiest sold first so their price could pay dowries for the plain. Victorian audiences read it as ancient history and as a sly mirror of the marriage market in their own drawing rooms.

Long had reached that subject by a roundabout road. He started as a portrait painter steeped in the Spanish masters, copying Velázquez in Madrid, until a trip to Egypt and Syria in 1874 turned him toward the archaeological, Orientalist scenes that made his fortune. He painted them very large and very detailed, and buyers paid accordingly.

A shy man who kept out of public life, Long grew wealthy enough to build his own grand house and studio. The Babylonian Marriage Market was bought in 1882 by Thomas Holloway, the patent-medicine millionaire, and still hangs in the college he founded west of London, Royal Holloway.