Book Review.Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World, National Gallery Press, Yale, 2011.

I bought this book at last year’s exhibition on Eastlake, but haven’t had the time to read and review it until this year.

 

There are many things that this book does well, but it succeeds above all in giving Lady Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby) her rightful place at the centre of the whirl of Victorian art and institutional politics, something that previous accounts of the Eastlakes have failed to do. Not only was Rigby a formidable writer, translating such early surveys of Italian art as Kugler’s Handbook on Painting and famously criticising Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but she drew, and contributed much to the study of art history through her many translations, essays and work for her husband.

Born into a family of middle-class professionals, the daughter of a doctor, Elizabeth took drawing lessons from Cotman, visited Germany and developed an intellectual personality which emerged in her writings for the conservative journal, The Quarterly Review as well as her translations and reflections as a lady traveller in Europe. In 1849 Rigby married the diffident painter and rising star of the London art administration community, Charles Locke Eastlake. Though they were a well-matched couple, there was a hint of pragmatism about the union; she saw it as a form of “rationalised happiness.” Not much is known about the personal side of the Eastlake’s marriage, so it is impossible to know exactly what she could have meant. The authors are probably correct in assuming that Lady Eastlake destroyed this personal material in order to preserve certain aspects of the marriage.

John Partridge, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake,1825, National Portrait Gallery, pencil, 24.1 x18.4 cm.

In the opening section of the book, Charles Lock Eastlake is sketched quickly. Born in Plymouth, destined for the legal profession, but saved from that fate by becoming a pupil to that most eccentric of English painters- Benjamin Robert Haydon. We further learn that the young Eastlake studied anatomy, read Goethe, cultivated a quietly ambitious philosophy, aided by a regime of diligence and perseverance. One of the most intriguing insights is made about how the retiring Eastlake would never affirm himself, but disclosed his character through others. As the authors note, when he describes his friend Sir Robert Peel, he is talking about himself:

“He probably, in early life, began with accurate habits, which make…an attention to details always easy, and which are the best foundation for enlarged experience. A slip-slod workman is good for neither; he can neither be a plodder nor a philosopher. Without attention to the business of the moment there can be no accuracy, without accuracy and industry (the evidence of zeal) there can be no extensive knowledge of facts and details, which are the pabulum of judgement, and the only true groundwork of theory.”

Sir Thomas Lawrence. Maria Graham, Lady Calcott, 1819.

And it is fascinating to learn that Eastlake was not the only individual to indulge in this veiled -disclosure. The Giotto scholar and subject of one of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s paintings, Maria Graham, wrote a life of Poussin whose (supposedly) philosophical qualities and working habits matched Eastlake’s, according to the authors. Maria Graham was the first in a series of lady connoisseurs who gravitated to men like Eastlake, and it would be an interesting exercise to study how connoisseurship worked within 19^th century marriages, or female society. Though connoisseurship is often seen as a predominantly male preserve, instances of famous couples who were leading connoisseurs could be found in the Victorian and later periods. What one would have given to be a fly on the wall at the meeting between Bernard and Mary Berenson and the ailing Lady Eastlake later in the century?

John Prescott Knight, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, Royal Academy, London, 1857.

Though this book’s purpose is not to discuss connoisseurship per se, it could hardly ignore it completely given Eastlake’s legendary powers of visual analysis and picture expertize. In a chapter on Eastlake as Director of the National Gallery, a model of Eastlake’s working methods is set out, - and it makes for compelling reading. The first stage of what Avery-Quash and Sheldon call Eastlake’s “three protocols of connoisseurship” consists of first-hand and proto-scientific analysis of works of art; a subdivision of this involved taking exact measurements and accurate transcriptions of any inscriptions, dates, signatures, monograms and ciphers. Though Eastlake spent a lot of time in the archives studying signatures, he was the inferior of Otto Mündler, the NG’s travelling agent who was more skilled at the “morphology of artist’s signatures.” Other sub-sections of this first protocol consisted of technical examination involving the use of chemists, which would eventually lead to the establishment of the scientific department of the National Gallery. This is hardly surprising as Eastlake was keenly interested in the materials and supports of artists; he published Materials for a History of Oil Painting in 1847. Finally, staying within the first category, to a limited extent, Eastlake noted “significant forms” in the manner of Morelli, physiognomic details. It is clear that Eastlake was not really sold on the Morellian method, though he did give examples like the “locking inwards of legs” in the paintings of Luca Signorelli.

The second protocol consisted of comparative analyses of a broad range of artworks in Eastlake’s meticulously kept notebooks. Here, Eastlake differed greatly from the likes of Morelli and Berenson who disdained this note-taking activity preferring to use their eyes; but Eastlake was an archivist through and through, and more significantly an administrator who knew the necessity of noting down details. It was noted by one of his contemporaries that Sir Charles wrote brilliant minutes! Where Eastlake gelled with Berenson was in his use of photographic reproductions to aid comparative study of pictures. Interestingly, Lady Eastlake shared the same emphasis as her husband on photography; she even wrote on it and saw its potential for connoisseurship.

At the risk of using a phrase sounding like some dreadful thriller novel, the final protocol made scrupulous use of archival and secondary source material: examination of inscriptions, sometimes in archives abroad. This was supported by what the authors call the “formation of a pioneering private library,” the result of frequenting book shops on the continent. This would eventually form the core of the NG’s own library. For Eastlake, a picture had to be “eligible”, for acquisition by the National Gallery. He would award a positive or negative attribution after weighing up all the facts and possibilities, even re-visiting the picture in the final stages of the process. Above all, he was anxious, to quote his wife, of not “morally or connoisseurially” disappointing in his choices. What Eastlake would have made of today’s market-driven, internet-promoting scramble for attributions and re-discoveries, is anybody’s guess.

John Singer Sergeant,”Vernon Lee”, aka Violet Paget, Tate Gallery, London, 1881.

In the years after her husband died, in 1865, Lady Eastlake continued to write, intent on prolonging Sir Charles’s ideas on art history and connoisseurship. Her later writings coincided with the appearance of the Aesthetic Movement, most famously Walter Pater who poeticised renaissance art and inspired the jeunesse d’oree of the Florentine circle of Berenson, including writers such as Vernon Lee, the pen name of Violet Paget. In 1895 Lee published a dreamy, meandering book inspired by Pater called Renaissance Fancies in which she declared that the business of sorting out originals from copies, and masters from pupils, made us alive to the delight such works could bestow. In this, Vernon Lee made the case for connoisseurship to enhance not only the viewer’s enjoyment of art, but affirm life’s positives. This clearly had the stamp of Berenson who used phrases such as “life-affirming” when discussing attributions and connoisseurship generally, an attitude generated by his study of philosophy and aesthetics at Harvard, later to be supplanted by expertizing and picture valuing. It’s difficult to know exactly what Lady Eastlake made of this “aesthetics of connoisseurship,”, though the authors state that she would have been impervious to this new mode of writing about art. At the same time Avery-Quash and Sheldon concede that Lady E’s comments on Pater, Lee and John Addington Symonds passed unrecorded. Would her meeting with the Berensons have revealed common ground, or would they have remained diametrically opposed about connoisseurship? Her remarks about Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and by extension Morelli, inhabiting “the land of the perpetual perhaps”, suggest that Lady Eastlake lost patience with the new blend of subjective connoisseurship presented in a bouquet of aesthetics and poetic effusion. To be fair to Cavalcaselle though, it was Crowe who went in for the purple passage while the Italian sought facts about the art, something that Lady Eastlake must surely have known. Berenson certainly did.

David Octavius Hill, and Robert Adamson, Elizabeth Eastlake, 1843-8, calotype, National Portrait, Gallery, London,

Another of Lady Eastlake’s stratagems was to try to get Charles Lock Eastlake (the nephew) into the directorship of the NG, in order that he too as another “keeper of the flame” could preserve his uncle’s memory in the new, modernised institution that the ex-Director had created. Despite the fact that he could never live up to his uncle’s reputation and had therefore no chance of getting the job, it is heart-breaking to read this tale of an earnest, capable man enduring his defeat stoically in his retirement amongst his modest pictures and prints,- there’s nothing more sadder than ambition and talent unrewarded. Yet how could the nephew, or how could any of them hope to aspire to the heights of achievement that Eastlake reached? His triumphs are simply staggering. During his three years as Director, Eastlake acquired something in the region of 171 pictures for the gallery; he had transformed a ramshackle operation into a sleek, modern machine that ran smoothly; and he had set down rigorous standards for the studying, cataloguing and presentation of paintings that the museum observes today. Every director that followed him is considerably in his debt.

A rewarding read throwing light on some of the darker corners of Eastlake scholarship. Recommended for those interested in the National Gallery and the culture of connoisseurship surrounding it.  

Comments

[Francis DeStefano]

Thanks for a very nice and thorough review.

Frank

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