Eyre Crowe (1824-1910)

‘Trial for Bigamy’ by Eyre Crowe A.R.A. (1897). Reproduction from Royal Academy Pictures, 1897, p. 117

Sketch for ‘Trial for Bigamy’ – offered for sale by Tennants auctioneers, 2024

Medium: oil

Size: 30 x 42 inches

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1897

Trial for Bigamy is mentioned in Pamela Gerrish Nunn’s Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (1995, p. 65). Nunn contrasts various paintings of the 1880s and 1890s depicting relationships between men and women, which she describes as ‘chocolate-box vignettes, vapid pot-boilers … escapist … flip’, with Crowe’s more serious work. Trial for Bigamy depicts a contemporary rather than historical or fictional event, and uses realistic details and muted colours; by these means, ‘the adversaries are brought out of the assembled crowd enough to assist the narrative but not so as to melodramatize their roles’. The picture was based on the Crown Court in the Town Hall at Leeds, which Crowe had undoubtedly visited during one of his trips to the north as an Inspector of government art schools.

This is probably the painting ‘The Trial’, which was auctioned by Richard Bourne on 14 August 1984. The size in the 1984 sale was only slightly different to that given in 1897: 34 x 43 inches (86 x 109 cm).

A smaller oil painting of a similar scene, the frame of which is signed and dated Ey. Crowe, 14th-15th December 1896, was offered for sale by Tennants Auctioneers of Leyburn at auction on 16 August 2024, where it was described as ‘after Eyre Crowe’, and reached £350. Size 24.5cm by 29cm. It could be a sketch for the final painting. This smaller painting was offered for sale again by Mallams of Oxford on 10 December 2025, this time sized at 25cm by 30.5cm.

According to Crowe’s diaries, he began a first sketch of the bigamy subject on 24 October 1896.

Athenaeum, 15 May 1897:

The visitor who is enquiring after novel bits of genre in this exhibition will find that Mr. Eyre Crowe has hit upon a new and telling subject for his most important work of the year, a comparatively large representation of a Trial for Bigamy (No. 580) in an English court. The first wife, a comely young woman with a child in her arms, is in the witness-box, and nervously gives evidence against the culprit, who does not seem to like his position. The second wife and a sympathetic friend or sister are seated in the lower part of the court; the former hides her face in her handkerchief and weeps silently. The jurymen differ as much as they ought to differ, and every face in the box is full of character; and so are the queer visages of the ‘public’, all of them more or less unwashed and vulgar. The tragi-comedy of the subject has been sympathetically studied; there are traces of humour here and there, not a little satire, and plenty of spirit… The rough surfaces and somewhat opaque colour of these pictures are unfortunate, and tell greatly against them.

Manchester Courier, 10 May 1897:

Mr Eyre Crowe’s ‘Trial for Bigamy’ (no. 580) is just the kind of picture which the enemies of the Academy quote and requote in their diatribes about the hanging on the line and the rejection of outsiders’ works. The picture is certainly an awful example to the would-be Bigamist.