An Artist's Divorce Lets Us Revise Art History

If you check the Wikipedia article for the Victorian pre-Raphaelite painter Jane Benham Hay, you read this about her personal life: "Jane married artist William Hay in 1851 and they had a son the following year. However, their marriage did not last long as Jane left London for Florence in the mid-1850s. Around the same time, she met Francesco Saverio Altamura...They married and had a son together, Bernardo Hay (1864–1934)." If you ask art historian experts, such as Dr. Jan Marsh, you learn that "she left her husband William Hay, said to have been a rather middle- of-the-road artist, and their child, to run away to Italy where she lived with an artist called Francesco Altamura and had more children. But really much of this is guesswork." In other words, there simply hasn't been much information available about her personal life, so people made assumptions about a romantic scandal.


But what happens if we look at the words of Jane Hay herself in her affidavit for divorce and the protection of her earnings in 1867? To begin with, she is almost unique among my subjects so far in straightforwardly presenting her career as the equal of her husband's: "That her said husband and herself are both Artists by profession and during the whole time of their residing together she not only maintained herself and the said two children but also contributed towards the maintenance of her said husband by her own labor and exertions as an Artist."


Furthermore, her explanation of her "running away to Italy" four years after their wedding is presented extremely differently: "That in the month of April 1855 with her said husband's consent and approval she went to Florence to execute a commission she had received to copy some pictures in the Gallery there, leaving her two children in the care of her Mother. That at the time she left England she was enceinte [pregnant] with the third and only other child of the marriage."


Once she had been in Florence for a few months, Jane sent a letter to William asking him to join her in Florence for her pre-birth confinement, or, if that was "an inconvenience to him," saying that she could return home to England so they could be together for the birth. He responded by refusing to visit and telling her that he had decided he was too young (at age 24) to have a wife and children and that he did not intend to have the children with him or provide for them. "Nor," Jane continues tartly, "has he evinced the slightest interest in their existence except only after the death of her late father with reference to her share of her late father’s property."
So Jane stayed in Florence and gave birth on her own to their third son, Gerald, while her older two boys, Ernest and Waldo, remained with her mother for some time before Ernest came out to join her. in Italy. Waldo, who must have been only a toddler at the time, remained with her mother and was raised and educated by her in England. Her second husband/lover Francesco and her last son Bernardo are nowhere mentioned in this document, although Bernardo would have been born 9 years after her husband's desertion and three years before their formal divorce.

According to Jane, she is coming back to England for the divorce, even though she allowed William to claim a 1/3rd share of her inheritance from her father (worth about 66 pounds a year), because she has "two paintings she believes to be of value" that she wants to exhibit in London. These are likely the paintings, "England and Italy," perhaps featuring at least one of her sons, and Portrait of a Boy in Florentine Costume, which doesn't seem to be available on the Net but may again likely feature one of her children. England and Italy was lost for over a hundred years and turned up recently in the collection of a Boston family. Jane went on to exhibit five times at the Royal Academy in England and is now thought of as one of the relatively rare pre-Raphaelite women painters. William Hay died in obscurity.

Here is a portrait of Jane and her second husband, Francesco Altamura, who seems to have been a much better partner. Their son, Bernardo Hay, went on to become a noted artist in his own right. Ernest Hay seems to have become a doctor; we do not know what happened to Waldo, who disappeared entirely from the historical record, or Gerald.

As usual, we don't have William's testimony, so I can't fully disprove the currently accepted notion of a romantic scandalous affair with an Italian lover. But the judge accepted Jane's testimony, and William never offered his own response, having taken "his" share of her inheritance in cash and vanished from the scene. So here perhaps is a chance to revise the interpretation of this "lady painter" as a promiscuous artist and instead consider her as a professional woman pursuing her career in order to lovingly support her four sons, with the help of her own mother.