Saint George Hare

When The Victory of Faith hung at the Royal Academy in London in 1891, visitors saw two young women asleep in a Roman prison cell, one dark-skinned and one pale, one of them in shackles. They are Christian martyrs on the night before they are to be given to the beasts. It was Saint George Hare's first major nude, and it travelled on to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and to the Paris Salon the following year. Since 1905 it has belonged to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the gift of an anonymous donor.

Hare came from Limerick in Ireland, where he trained at the local school of art before a scholarship took him to the National Art Training School in South Kensington, London, in 1875. He stayed in London for the rest of his life, painting portraits and subject pictures, and in 1891 he was among the founders of the Chelsea Arts Club, a meeting place for artists. He came back more than once to chained, half-dressed women, most famously in The Gilded Cage of 1908. His most loyal patron was Sir Henry Hoare, a baronet of the banking family, whose relatives Hare painted several times.