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Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
In nineteenth-century Britain, at a moment when art history was crystallizing into a discipline and the social and public function of art was a topic of heated debate, a significant number of women pursued careers in art writing, positioning themselves as authoritative voices in this newly emerging field. Female art historians, writers, and critics authored countless monographs, articles, pamphlets, guidebooks, and travel accounts detailing their encounters with old master works of art. However, like female artists — the ‘Old Mistresses’ — their important contributions to the history of art have remained largely unacknowledged. This landmark collection celebrates the foundational interventions of women such as Maria Callcott, Anna Jameson, Mary Merrifield, Elizabeth Eastlake, Julia Cartwright, Maud Cruttwell, Mary Berenson, Lucy Olcott Perkins, and Christiana Herringham in the history, collection, display, and reception of the old masters. Featuring fifteen articles from a range of disciplinary perspectives, and uncovering a wealth of little-known texts and unpublished archival material, it takes us from women’s early forays into art criticism in late eighteenth-century travel writing through their accomplishment of sound scholarly methods and professional reputations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The issue discusses art historians whose methods were empirical and whose objectives were to achieve a greater understanding of technical skills of old master painters, alongside women who wrote lyrically about the imaginative aspects of their work, or were more interested in analysing its iconographical as well as its historical and political dimensions. It thinks about how women look at old master paintings, such as Moroni’s Tailor, then and now. An appendix of short biographies of the women discussed provides factual information about their lives, and a comprehensive bibliography takes stock of where we have arrived, demonstrating just how substantial and multifaceted the field has become, and how impossible to ignore. Cover image: Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, The Virgin and Child with Saints Paul and George, after Giovanni Bellini, pen and ink, 12.6 × 15.9 cm, The Lady Eastlake Drawing Album (1842–58), fol. 39. © The National Gallery, London. The thumbnails in the Table of Contents for the introduction to this issue and to Diane Apostolos-Cappadona’s introduction to the Biographical Section are details from this drawing.
Preface
Introduction
Introduction
Maria Alambritis (ed.), Susanna Avery-Quash and Hilary Fraser
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Articles
‘Nothing seems to have escaped her’: British Women Travellers as Art Critics and Connoisseurs (1775–1825)
Isabelle Baudino
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
‘A revolution in art’: Maria Callcott on Poussin, Painting, and the Primitives
Caroline Palmer
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Illuminating the Old Masters and Enlightening the British Public: Anna Jameson and the Contribution of British Women to Empirical Art History in the 1840s
Susanna Avery-Quash
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Postscript to ‘Illuminating the Old Masters and Enlightening the British Public’
Susanna Avery-Quash
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Navigating Networks in the Victorian Age: Mary Philadelphia Merrifield’s Writing on the Arts
Zahira Véliz Bomford
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Lady Eastlake and the Characteristics of the Old Masters
Julie Sheldon
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
George Eliot, Lady Eastlake, and the Humbug of Old Masters
Patricia Rubin
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
‘Such a pleasant little sketch […] of this irritable artist’: Julia Cartwright and the Reception of Andrea Mantegna in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain
Maria Alambritis (ed.)
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Writing Cosmopolis: The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Emilia Dilke and Vernon Lee
Hilary Fraser
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Mary Berenson and The Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court
Ilaria Della Monica
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
An Unpublished Essay by Mary Berenson, ‘Botticelli and his Critics’ (1894–95)
Jonathan K. Nelson
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Maud Cruttwell and the Berensons: ‘A preliminary canter to an independent career’
Tiffany L. Johnston
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Writing Under Pressure: Maud Cruttwell and the Old Master Monograph
Francesco Ventrella
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Collaboration and Correction: Re-examining the Writings of Lucy Olcott Perkins, ‘a lady resident in Siena’
Imogen Tedbury
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Women in the Galleries: New Angles on Old Masters in the Late Nineteenth Century
Meaghan Clarke
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
‘This will be a popular picture’: Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Tailor and the Female Gaze
Lene Østermark-Johansen
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Biographical Section
Mary Berenson (14 February 1864–23 March 1945)
Tiffany L. Johnston
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Maria, Lady Callcott (19 July 1785–21 November 1842)
Caroline Palmer
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Julia Cartwright (7 November 1851–28 April 1924)
Maria Alambritis (ed.)
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Maud Alice Wilson Cruttwell (1860–1939)
Francesco Ventrella
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Emilia Francis, Lady Dilke (2 September 1840–24 October 1904)
Hilary Fraser
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Elizabeth Eastlake (17 November 1809–2 October 1893)
Julie Sheldon
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Christiana Herringham (8 December 1852–25 February 1929)
Meaghan Clarke
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Anna Brownell Jameson (17 May 1794–17 March 1860)
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Vernon Lee (14 October 1856–13 February 1935)
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (15 April 1804–4 January 1889)
Zahira Véliz Bomford
2019-06-03 Issue 28 • 2019 • Old Masters, Modern Women
Bibliography
19 Live
[In]Visible: Paintings by Women Artists in the National Gallery, London: An Interview with Letizia Treves and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
Susanna Avery-Quash, Letizia Treves and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
2019-06-03 19 Live
Also a part of:
Review of ‘Annie Swynnerton: Painting Light and Hope’, Manchester Art Gallery
Emma Merkling
2019-06-03 19 Live
Also a part of:
Review of ‘Christiana Herringham: Artist, Campaigner, Collector’, Royal Holloway, Emily Wilding Davison Building
Maria Alambritis (ed.)
2019-06-03 19 Live
Also a part of: