The Governess

The oil painting The Governess (in the original The Governess) is one of the best-known paintings by the British painter Richard Redgrave, together with the painting The Sempstress. Redgrave saw it as an artist's duty to also deal with the social problems of his respective time. With the portrayal of a governess, he took up the public discussion that began around 1840 about the limited employment opportunities of wealthless women of the educated middle class. The painting has become the most frequently used pictorial representation of the so-called governmental misery. Accordingly, it was used for cover images of editions of the novel Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, which belongs to the genre of the governess novel.