Collections Online

A group of young women – the bal maidens - stride through a country lane, on their way to work. Bal maidens were women that worked in the mines at Cornwall and West Devon. ‘Bal’ is Cornish for mine, and maiden is a woman who is young or unmarried. The Bal Maidens worked on the surface of the mines, processing metal ores like tin, copper and lead. By the time Emily Mary Osborn painted this in the 1870s, the number of bal maidens was in decline, in part due to Victorian ideas about gender roles – hard manual labour was considered unsuitable for women. This painting was displayed at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts in 1873, and a reviewer for the Art Journal called it a ‘spirited composition’ with a subject ‘out of the beaten track'. As a woman, Emily Mary Osborn had restricted access to art training, and her name was among those who petitioned the Royal Academy to admit female students, in 1859. She was involved with campaigns for women’s suffrage, and was closely associated with activist and fellow artist Barbara Bodichon. Much of her work drew attention to the life and plight of women in Victorian society.

WA_SC4.1