A Vitória da Fé

Saint George Hare, an Irish painter from Limerick, showed this at London's Royal Academy in 1891, and Victorian audiences knew how to read it. Two young women lie asleep on straw, one of them shackled, and behind the bars in the dark a lion's eyes catch the light. They are Christian martyrs, waiting through their last night for the beasts of the arena. The Victorians called it an image of faith untroubled by fear, which let a very frank study of two entwined nude bodies pass as a sermon. One woman is fair, the other dark-skinned, and later writers have read the pair quite differently than the religious press did in 1891. It travelled on to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.