‘My name is the right one’: Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake’s Professional Art Crticism

Abstract

This paper examines an influential but now neglected Victorian critic: Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake (1809-1893). Eastlake developed a sizeable reputation beginning in the 1840s as a travel writer and art critic. She was an expert on German culture and was one of the first writers to introduce the British public to early Italian art. Most important, Eastlake differed from more canonical male art critics by focusing on both historical facts and the formal analysis of artworks. At the same time, Eastlake developed a prose style that rivaled that of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. In combining expertise about artworks with a critical style, Eastlake revises our notion of when and how art commentary became a professional discipline. While scholars generally claim that professional Victorian art criticism was consolidated through the work of male writers in the 1860s and 1870s, Eastlake became a specialist some twenty-five years earlier.