Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake (17 November 1809 – 2 October 1893), born Elizabeth Rigby, was an English author, art critic and art historian, who made regular contributions for the Quarterly Review. She is known not only for her writing but also for her significant role in the London art world.
Life
Elizabeth Eastlake was born in Norwich into the large family of Edward and Anne Rigby. Her father, a physician and classical scholar, and her mother included her in their social life and conversation with prominent citizens and intellectuals.
Elizabeth was fond of drawing from a young age and continued studying art into her twenties, when she was taught to draw and etch by the artist Edward Daniell.[1] She was privately educated and learnt French and Italian, but after an illness in 1827, she was sent to convalesce in Germany and Switzerland. She stayed two years and started a lifetime of publication with a translation of Johann David Passavant's essay on English art; a second trip to Germany in 1835 led to an article on Goethe. After travelling to Russia and Estonia to visit a married sister, her published letters and her travel book A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841) led to an invitation to write for the Quarterly Review by the editor, John Gibson Lockhart.
In 1842, the widowed Anne Rigby moved with her daughters to Edinburgh, where Elizabeth's literary career brought entry to an intellectual social circle including prominent figures such as Lord Jeffrey, John Murray and David Octavius Hill, who photographed her in a series of about 20 early calotypes, assisted by Robert Adamson.[2]
Despite a diary entry in 1846 saying there were many "compensations" for unmarried women, three years later, at 40, Elizabeth married Sir Charles Lock Eastlake,[3] artist, art historian and critic, first Director of the National Gallery in London, and in 1853 the first president of the Photographic Society. She joined him in an active working and social life, entertaining artists such as Landseer and mixing with a wide range of well-known people, from Lord Macaulay to Anna Jameson and Ada Lovelace. Her habit of continental travel continued through the 1850s and 1860s as she and her husband toured several European countries in search of new acquisitions for the gallery.[4]
Eastlake wrote very extensively about art. Julie Sheldon in The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake has compiled a full bibliography.[5]
Some highlights are:
Reviews of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, in the Quarterly Review vol. 84, 1848 - notorious for her very critical view of Jane Eyre.[6] She disputed the morality of the novel, writing that ‘the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature’ and summarising with ‘It is a very remarkable book: we have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste’.[7]
Music and the Art of Dress, an 1852 book containing two of her previous Quarterly Review essays on these topics
Modern Painters, in the Quarterly Review, vol. 98, 1856 - a long in-depth critical review of John Ruskin's aesthetic theory. She rejected his "fundamental false principle" that "the language of painting is invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing".[8] She replied that each art (e.g. painting) has to do what only it can do and that "the more of art the less of superadded thought will a picture be found capable of containing".[9] Ruskin has confused poetry and painting: whereas poetry uses signs to express thought, painting depicts things.[10]
Photography, in the Quarterly Review, vol. 101, 1857 - much-scrutinised and one of the earliest commentaries on the form.[11] Some have argued that she denies 'works of light' a place among the fine arts.[12] She claims that photography mechanically reproduces details without judgement, yet it is more precise and accurate than the human eye and here "the much-lauded and much-abused agent called Photography takes her legitimate stand".[13] "For everything for which Art has hitherto been the means, but not the end, photography is the allotted agent",[14] which can leave art freer to become more truly artistic.
The History of Our Lord, 1864, her completion of the last two volumes of the Sacred and Legendary Art book series by her late friend Anna Jameson.
She helped to disseminate German art history in England, both as critic and as translator of (Waagen and Kugler). She sometimes collaborated with her husband Charles Eastlake, and she wrote a memoir of him after his death in 1865.
In 1895 her nephew Charles Eastlake Smith edited her Letters and Correspondence.
Reputation
In the 20th century, she was remembered mostly for Photography and her review of Jane Eyre. Her criticism of John Ruskin has been linked to her role as confidante to his estranged wife, Effie Gray. According to historian Rosemary Mitchell, however, her work as art historian and writer was significant and original. Mitchell considers Eastlake to have been a scholarly and perceptive critic,[16] and Marion Lochhead regards Eastlake as a 'pioneer of feminine journalism'.[17]
She has been placed in a line of important women art historians in nineteenth century Britain along with Anna Jameson and Emilia Dilke.[18]
More critically, Janice Schroeder decries her values supporting women's subordinate place in the class structure within British imperialism.[19]
Livonian Tales: The Disponent, The Wolves, The Jewess By the Author of Letters from the Baltic New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 85 - Library of Select Novels
^Linda Wolk (1983) Calotype portraits of Elizabeth Rigby by
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, History of Photography, 7:3, 167-181, DOI:10.1080/03087298.1983.10442012
^Olsen, Victoria C (2003), From life : Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian photography, Aurum Press, p. 97, ISBN978-1-85410-891-3
^Adele M. Ernstrom, "Equally Lenders and Borrowers": The Working and Married Lives of the Eastlakes', Art History, 15/4 (1992)
^Eastlake, Elizabeth (1856), "Modern Painters", Quarterly Review (98): 388
^Eastlake, Elizabeth (1856), "Modern Painters", Quarterly Review (98): 392
^Eastlake, Elizabeth (1856), "Modern Painters", Quarterly Review (98): 394–395
^Melissa Miles (2008) Sun-pictures and shadow-play: Untangling the web of gendered metaphors in Lady Elizabeth Eastlake's ‘Photography’, Word & Image, 24:1, 42-50, DOI:10.1080/02666286.2008.10444073
^Josh Ellenbogen (2010) The Eye of the Sun and the Eye of God, Visual Resources, 26:2, 113-130, DOI:10.1080/01973761003750633
^Marian Lochhead, Elizabeth Rigby: Lady Eastlake. London: John Murray, 1961, p.1
^Kanwit, John Paul (2013), Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer, Ohio State University Press
^Schroeder, J. (1998). Strangers in Every Port: Stereotypes of Victorian Women Travellers. Victorian Review: The Journal of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, 24(2), 118–29.
