—Joss Whedon WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? In 1882, at a Christie’s auction in London, the record was set for the highest price ever paid (six thousand pounds) for a painting by a living artist. The work? The Babylonian Marriage Market, by Edwin Longsden Long. If the crickets are chirping as you ransack your memory, do not worry: Neither Long nor his monumental canvas is a household name today. But both certainly were in 1882, when Thomas Holloway, the famed English vendor of patently iffy patent medicines (Queen Victoria herself was said to have consumed Holloway’s Pills), paid his colossal sum. The painting, a large, dramatic, exquisitely detailed study of an ancient market where women without dowries were subsidized via the trade in more desirable brides (as described in a “far-fetched” tale by Herodotus), was a sensation, both popular and critical. No less an eminence than John Ruskin deemed it a “painting of great merit.” Despite its ancient subject, it was very much of its day.
