Elizabeth Eastlake

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]

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, portrait sketch, 1831, Victoria & Albert Museum

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.

Amongst her other writings are pieces on Madame de Stael, Anna Jameson, the Royal Female School of Art, Kaspar Hauser, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, and Dürer. The last five became the subjects of her book Five Great Painters (1883).[15]

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.

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]

• A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841); London, 1844. OCLC 315701533
• Review of Jane Eyre by Eizabeth Rigby
• Music and The Art of Dress, two essays reprinted from the Quarterly Review (1852)
• 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
• Photography 1857
• 60 drawings by Elizabeth Rigby from the Tate Gallery
• The history of Our Lord as exemplified in works of art (1890)
• Baltische briefe...(Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1846)
• Journals and correspondence of Lady Eastlake (London, J. Murray, 1895)

Elizabeth is portrayed by Emma Thompson in the film Effie Gray, the script of which was also written by Thompson.

• Anna Brownell Jameson
• John Gibson

• Mitchell, Rosemary (2004). "Eastlake [née Rigby], Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8415. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Lady Eastlake and Edinburgh Society in The Scotsman, 4 December 1895
• National Galleries of Scotland
• Scran

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elizabeth Eastlake.

• Works by or about Elizabeth Eastlake at Wikisource
• "Archival material relating to Elizabeth Eastlake". UK National Archives.