The Babylonian Marriage Market

Long painted this in 1875 from a story in the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. In Babylon, Herodotus wrote, the young women of a village were once auctioned off for marriage each year, the most beautiful sold first to the highest bidder, and the money they fetched used to provide dowries for the plainer ones nobody would pay for. Long lines them up along a wall, veiled and waiting their turn, and invites the Victorian viewer to read the row like a price list. The painting was a sensation, and in 1882 the businessman Thomas Holloway bought it for about 6,000 guineas, then the most ever paid at auction for a work by a living British artist. He hung it in the women's college he was founding, where it still is.