Alfred Elmore

Elmore seems to have been associated with The Clique, a group of young artists who saw themselves as followers of Hogarth and David Wilkie.

According to his friend William Powell Frith he was member of the group, but since it was most active while he was in continental Europe, his involvement was probably short-lived.

Elmore's best-known work is On the Brink (1865; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), a moral genre painting depicting a young woman who has lost her money gambling, and is 'on the brink' of responding to the blandishments of a seducer, who is depicted as a satan-like figure, luridly bathed in red light, and whispering corrupting thoughts in her ear.

By the late 1860s, Elmore was moving away from such Hogarthian subjects towards a more classical style influenced by Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Elmore suffered from neuralgia through much of his life, and in his later years he became lame following a bad fall from his horse.