Lady Godiva

John Collier painted this Godiva in 1897, working in a late Pre-Raphaelite manner long after that movement's first flush. The legend has the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman ride naked through Coventry to shame her husband into lifting a crushing tax on the townspeople. Collier leaves out the part everyone remembers, the voyeur later nicknamed Peeping Tom, and with him the whole idea of the ride as spectacle. His Godiva bows her head and looks inward, more penitent than exposed, moving through empty medieval streets. The woman on the white horse was a real Londoner, a theatre actress and model named Mabel, not a distant medieval figure at all. The painting reached Coventry, Godiva's own town, by a roundabout route. A social reformer left it in his will first to Hampstead, and only if Hampstead refused it was it to go to Coventry, which is where it hangs today, in the Herbert gallery.