ABSTRACT
Almost every year between 1903 and 1908 John Collier exhibited a problem picture at the Academy, the four most successful of which were The Prodigal Daughter, The Cheat, Mariage de Convenance, and The Sentence of Death. These years were the height of the ‘cult’ of the fashionable problem picture, as the type received an enormous amount of press coverage, the term ‘problem picture’ was invented and came into widespread use, and Collier’s name became synonymous with the form. As in the case of The Prodigal Daughter, The Cheat sparked complex discussions of femininity and class. Reviews of Collier’s picture of 1907, Mariage de Convenance, were the first explicitly to identify the viewer of the problem picture as female. Critics for the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, the two largest circulation dailies, refer to the female viewer as both more interested in and better at decoding the picture.
