No choice?, c.1850 (oil on canvas)

Most of Grant's work is of subjects from history, but he also painted early Victorian social realism, particularly the plight of compromised women. He died young, at the age of 37. In this painting of about 1850 a distraught young woman with unkempt hair and a once clean dress has apparently reached the end of a hard road, probably in the complex of arches under the Adelphi buildings by the River Thames in St Martin in the Fields in London. In the grand houses above lived the great and the good, but under the arches that supported them above the river lurked the homeless and the desperate. The girl holds her crucifix, a last symbol of hope, while the river beyond beckons....