Found Drowned

George Frederic Watts painted Found Drowned around 1849-1850, one of his earliest social realist works depicting the body of a young woman washed up under a bridge. The painting addresses the Victorian social crisis of prostitution and suicide among desperate women, a subject treated in literature by Thomas Hood's famous poem "The Bridge of Sighs" (1844). Watts would become one of the great moral painters of the Victorian era.

The somber, restrained composition uses dark, muted tones to create an atmosphere of tragedy and pathos. Watts's broad, painterly technique and the deliberately simplified forms demonstrate his developing preference for expressive power over academic finish.