Jane Shore doing Penance

Here Jane Shore, born Elizabeth Shore but named Jane by Playwright Thomas Heywood in the 17th Century, was the daughter of a merchant, who became the mistress of King Edward IV after his return from France following the Treaty of Picquigny. Shore was instrumental in bringing about the alliance between Hastings and the Woodville’s while Richard Duke of Gloucester was Protector, before he took the throne as King Richard III. However, Shore was accused of carrying messages between the two sides and it was because of her role in this alliance that she was charged with conspiracy, along with Hastings and the Woodvilles, against the Protectors government. Shore’s punishment included open penance, as depicted in Redgrave’s composition, for her promiscuous behaviour as a result of her affairs with Edward IV. 

Redgrave uses classical medieval icons in his composition, typically used by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in whose style he was who sought to revive the art of the Middle Ages, to allude to Shore’s promiscuity. The depiction of her with red hair is used by Redgrave to connote the traditional association of the hair colour with lust and sin which is further exaggerated by the dripping red wax which is also a symbol of love and passion. The depiction of the wax dripping on her white cloak – traditionally symbolic of purity - is used by Redgrave to highlight Shore’s failed allusion of purity as her penance exposed her promiscuity as a mistress to the king. Redgrave in his composition also balances the humility and service of the public penance that Shore is subjected to, depicting her bare feet and the blue gown that pokes out beneath her white cloak as a sign of peace and as an acceptance of wrong doing. 

Richard Redgrave RA

Born in London to a manufacturing family, Redgrave was a genre and landscape painter, and the younger brother of art historian Samuel Redgrave. While working as a draughtsman in his father’s factory, Redgrave visited the British Museum to make drawings of the marble sculptures there and later his landscape painting The River Brent, Near Hanwell was selected for the 1825 Royal Academy exhibition. The following year Redgrave entered the Royal Academy Schools, after which his works were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy, The British Institution, and the Society of British Artists. Leaving his father’s firm in 1830, Redgrave continued to practice and made a living teaching art. 

He was elected as an Associate RA in 1840 and an Academician in 1851. Along with his brother Samuel he was a founding and life-long member of the Etching Club from 1837. These roles along with becoming an author slowed down Redgrave’s production of paintings in the last decades of his life. Redgrave also became a driving force alongside Henry Cole for the reform of art education in Great Britain, holding several positions at the Government School of Design (later the Royal College of Art), developing a national curriculum for art instruction. 

Redgrave along with Cole also supervised the new South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) for which Redgrave designed the innovative art gallery to house John Sheepshank’s extensive collection of British art. Redgrave also organised the International Exhibition in London in 1893 and the British art section for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855, in which he was awarded the cross of French Legion d’honneur.

In 1857 he was appointed surveyor of the queen’s pictures a position he held until 1880, during which time he produced a meticulous thirty-four volume manuscript catalogue of the paintings in the Royal Collection.

Redgrave was offered a knighthood in 1869, but declined and later died at home in Kensington London on the 14th of December 1888.

Museums
British Museum, London
Royal Academy of Art, London
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Getty Museum, Los Angeles