into the urban environment of London. Women began more freely to occupy the streets and travel the city. They would walk the streets, take public transportation, etc. This opened up opportunities for women but also introduced new social dynamics and there were many debates about this new dynamic and way of urban life. Nameless and Friendless is one of the few publicly exhibited paintings by a woman to address these new urban dynamics during the 1850s. In Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Deborah Cherry says that Nameless and Faceless is "concerned less with jostling crowds ... this is a painting about the ocular and corporeal encounters of the modern city and its sexual geographies of desire." Cherry notes how the picture plane is full of nuance in body language. The young lady is not active in the painting. The young woman is not only in the center of the picture plane, but also the center of attention of the other characters. The young woman is caught in the multiple gazes of the men around her. The setting appears to be the West End, where Cherry says "the legitimate and the obscene are on sale side-by-side." One of the seated male figures is holding a print with a scantily-clad dancer while the other man sitting next to him looks at the young woman in the center of the painting instead, indicating that the male gaze is sexual in nature and that in the urban landscape where women walk freely, they are still sexualized by the gazes of the men on the streets who can see them. Cherry says that "the gaze of the male customers – which possesses space and simultaneously captures image and body – signifies the hazards of sexual harassment for a respectable working woman in the highly charged and ambivalent spaces of modem London. And it returns us to the mutuality of bodies and space, ocularity and corporeality." Gallery References External links E M Osborn (Victorian Web) A woman scorned – an essay on Osborn's painting, "The Governess" (TES Connect) ArtNet: More works by Osborn. 1828 births 1925 deaths 19th-century English painters 19th-century English women artists 20th-century English painters 20th-century English women artists Artists from London English women painters People from West Tilbury Women of the Victorian era