the history of our lord as exemplified in works of art : anna jameson's coup de grâce

Women’s Writing, Volume 10, Number 1, 2003

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The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art: Anna Jameson’s coup de grâce

AINSLIE ROBINSON

ABSTRACT Following the death of the British writer and art historian, Anna Jameson, in 1860, the unfinished manuscript of her final work, The History of Our Lord, was undertaken and completed by another significant female art historian of the Victorian period, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake. This article highlights the differences between the two critics, and the relative benefits and detriments to the publication in spite of their mutual esteem for each other as women and writers. It also examines in some detail the contemporary responses to the work from the periodical press and other media, in particular the reaction to and debates concerning the role of Protestant critics in the interpretation of Christian (often overtly Catholic in subject) art.

Among nineteenth-century female art critics, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake and Anna Jameson have been given pre-eminence in a number of highly regarded examinations of art criticism in the period. Indeed, in his comprehensive work on the subject, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture 1830-1870, John Steegman declares Lady Eastlake foremost in nineteenth-century female art scholarship and deems Jameson a “literary lioness ... the most important link between old and new criticism” (pp. 187 and 197). Given their individual renown, a collaborative work by Jameson and Lady Eastlake ought to have enjoyed continual acclaim, but such is not the case. The work in question, The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art (1864) though noticed at the time of publication by a number of influential periodicals and papers, has suffered relative obscurity since the nineteenth century. The fate of this text is regrettable not only because it contains the writing of two of the most prominent nineteenth-century female art historians, but also because it marks the completion of Jameson’s “Sacred and Legendary Art” series, the pinnacle and the close of her writing career.

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One of the most interesting features of Jameson’s last publication is that its structure unexpectedly, and probably even accidentally, harks back to the “split” or “slippage” identified by Judith Johnston in Jameson’s debut work, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826) (Johnston, “Fracturing Perspectives”, p. 2). The complex layering of the text in the earlier work is due mainly to the alternating fictional and factual positions of the narrator. Similarly, the “slippage” in History of Our Lord occurs because of a duet of female voices, though in this case they belong to two separate women as opposed to one woman speaking for two. The characteristically multilayered approach Jameson takes to her texts tends to attract a similar style of analysis, and reviews of this work are no exception. The task is compounded by the relationship between the two writers, their individual status as art critics and their disparate agendas. In order to limit similar complications in the present argument, the text is discussed in the context of reviews contemporary with its publication.

About the time of publication, History of Our Lord drew considerable attention from a wide range of periodicals. The Quarterly Review, Fine Arts Quarterly Review, Dublin Review, Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Spectator, Gentleman’s Magazine, London Quarterly Review, Athenaeum, and Art-Journal all reviewed the work. The London Times also published a review. The topics discussed by the majority of reviewers are remarkably similar. They tend to focus on the professional relationship between Jameson and Eastlake, the circumstances necessitating Lady Eastlake’s involvement with History of Our Lord, the illustrations, and the contribution to art criticism made by this text. Several also take up the topical issue of religion in religious art criticism.

Jameson prefigures History of Our Lord in the introduction to her earlier work, Legends of the Madonna, where she writes, “of the prophets and the Sibyls who attend Christ in his character of the Messiah or Redeemer, I shall have much to say when describing the artistic treatment of the life and character of our Lord” (p. li).

There also appears to be evidence of a projected sequel to History of Our Lord. A reviewer notes that “Mrs Jameson herself, on a former occasion, expressed to the writer of the present article” the intention that her criticism concerning Old Testament representations would be “reserved and set apart to form a distinct and concluding volume” (Fine Arts Quarterly, 1 [1866], p. 137). Although this reviewer’s statement is unverifiable, the desire to continue publishing in the area of religious art criticism imputed to Jameson is commensurate with her tendency to plan works in advance.

Due to her death, The History of Our Lord became the finale to Jameson’s “Sacred and Legendary Art” series, already comprising Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), and Legends of the Madonna (1852). The volume that bears the series’ name, Sacred and Legendary Art, is the pinnacle of this four-part project. Nevertheless, History of Our Lord is important as the culminating work. Apart from its existence as a testimony to Jameson’s untiring

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commitment to art criticism and mass education, History of Our Lord draws to a close the crowning achievement of Jameson’s career. Furthermore, it examines themes and artworks conspicuous for their absence from the other volumes. Most notably, the life and works of Christ as represented in art are not comprehensively treated in the other three titles in the series, being only briefly elucidated in Legends of the Madonna, where Jesus is considered in relation to the history of his mother.

Jameson died in 1860, but it was not until 1864 that Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (née Rigby), urged by Jameson’s surviving sisters, undertook the task of completing History of Our Lord (Jameson, History, p. v). The choice of Lady Eastlake was an advised one made on the basis of her own reputation as an art critic and her acquaintance with Jameson dating back to May 1846. Subsequent to the women’s meeting, Elizabeth Rigby married Charles Eastlake, with whom Jameson was already friendly. The Eastlakes and Jameson dined regularly together in spite of their class differences, a consideration implied but never interrogated by reviewers.

Lady Eastlake and Jameson had much in common. They were of a similar age, writers, and familiar with Germany, German art and literature. Lady Eastlake translated Franz Kugler’s popular Handbook to Painting (1842) from German to English, after which it was frequently reviewed with Jameson’s Handbook to the Public Galleries (1842).[1] In 1852 Lady Eastlake translated Treasures of Art in Great Britain by the German art connoisseur, G.F. Waagen, with whom Jameson had, through the Eastlakes, an acquaintance. Lady Eastlake was also distantly related to Harriet Martineau, with whom Jameson had a sort of friendship. The Eastlakes were undoubtedly valuable friends to Jameson, not least for the entrée they provided into artistic, intellectual and high society via their elaborate dinner parties. Moreover, they had an intimate friendship with the Prince Consort, direct involvement with the prestigious Great Exhibition of 1851 (to which Jameson contributed the sculpture section of the catalogue), and access to the National Gallery collection when Charles Eastlake became Director (1854). However, it would be inaccurate to suggest, as Steegman does, that Jameson owed her reputation in art criticism to the Eastlakes (Victorian Taste, p. 197).

Steegman does not overrate Lady Eastlake’s contribution to art criticism, nor does he discredit Jameson entirely. Yet his implication that Jameson was in some way indebted to Lady Eastlake for her career in art criticism is quite unfounded. Jameson, who only met Lady Eastlake in 1846, had announced her specialisation as a writer on art in 1842, and had published art criticism in various forms since 1826.[2] Francis Haskell, in Rediscoveries in Art (1976), concedes that in spite of John Ruskin’s disdain, Jameson was “none the less ... probably second only to him in furthering the cult of the primitives” and, in an additional footnote, adds that “though Jameson is no connoisseur”, her work on Italian art subjects “has survived far more satisfactorily than most mid-

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nineteenth-century writing on the arts” (p. 106). Furthermore, he notes that Jameson’s friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, daughter-in-law of the writer, “significantly encouraged German cultural study in England” (p. 106).

Further proof of Jameson’s prior eminence as an art critic exists in terms of the women’s mutual contact with the publisher, John Murray. While Lady Eastlake was initiating a working relationship in the 1840s with the Quarterly Review, owned by Murray, Jameson was submitting mauscripts for publication. According to a Lady Eastlake biographer, Marion Lochhead, Jameson was corresponding with Murray around 1842 for the publication of her gallery guides at the same time Lady Eastlake was establishing herself as a periodical reviewer (Lochhead, Elizabeth Rigby, p. 29). Lochhead’s view of Jameson seems to suggest a degree of rivalry between the two women that, to my knowledge, is not borne out elsewhere. In fact, Lady Eastlake noted the following on the occasion of Jameson’s death:

She was ever kind to me – excellent in judgement & advice, a very strong woman, though never approaching the man – profound & conscientious in all she did, and devoted to such good works as the world knew nothing of. We shall not see her like again. Sir Charles laments her deeply. (Eastlake Smith, Journals, p. 137)

If any professional rivalry did exist, there may have been some satisfaction for Lady Eastlake in linking her name to that of Jameson in this final work. Ultimately, however, there was little enduring fame for either woman as a result of History of Our Lord, an interesting fact given their individual popularity in the period, and the more recent estimation of Jameson as the “first professional English art historian” (Holcomb, “First Professional”, pp. 171-187).

While there is no doubt that Jameson was highly regarded by the critics as a writer on art, Lady Eastlake is habitually given precedence by the reviewers on account of her husband. This is rather equivocal praise, in which a number of the reviewers indulge. For example, the London Quarterly Review contains the following claim:

Apart from Lady Eastlake’s own literary and artistic qualifications, her position as the wife of the President of the Royal Academy, and Director of the National Gallery, have naturally given her the greatest advantages for the successful undertaking of such a work as Mrs. Jameson had projected. Sir Charles is not only a distinguished artist, but ... a distinguished writer on art ... To this knowledge Lady Eastlake has of course had access. (23 [1864-65], p. 417)

The Edinburgh Review declares:

We think ... that this work has gained in excellence by the transfer of the most difficult portion of it to the hands of the accomplished wife of Sir Charles Eastlake ... she has the most intimate connexion with the President of the Royal Academy, – an artist and a critic unequalled in Europe for his


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thorough acquaintance with the early Italian schools of painting. (120 [1864], p. 96)

Interestingly, in a review of History of Our Lord contained in an 1866 issue of Fine Arts Quarterly Review, there is absolutely no mention of the relationship between the Eastlakes, though in this same issue a memoir of the late Charles Eastlake appears.

As Adele M. Ernstrom has shown, Lady Eastlake resisted the conflation of the Eastlakes’ individual projects, instead emphasising the mutual and “supportive capacity” of their union:

The Memoir [Lady Eastlake] wrote of Charles Eastlake after his death in 1865 expressly omits characterization of their union or of her role in his work. But other evidence suggests that so far as the relationship was subject to arrangements of the partners themselves, they were “equally lenders and borrowers in turn” ... with evidence both of common projects and a readiness to participate in each other’s work in a supportive capacity. (Ernstrom, “Equally Lenders and Borrowers”, p. 479)

Though she acknowledged Charles Eastlake’s encouragement of her efforts, and the loan of useful sources from his personal library, Lady Eastlake assumed full responsibility for the completion of History of Our Lord, which she deemed “her most important work” and “my work” (pp. 474 and 482; emphasis mine). While evidence supports the reviewers’ assumption that due to her marital connection Lady Eastlake would have had access to sources inaccessible to the average writer, any suggestion that her career emerged purely from her union with Charles Eastlake is to be refuted in the strongest terms. Elizabeth Eastlake clearly had the individual capacity to fulfil her authorial obligations, as evidenced by her “established identity as a writer at the time of her marriage at the age of thirty-nine, [and] a clear direction in her work maintained thereafter” (p. 479). Yet one is reminded that History of Our Lord is in fact a “collaborative” work for Lady Eastlake; not with her husband, but with the late Anna Jameson, a factor obscured or neglected in many reviews, often by the same reviewers who speculate on Charles Eastlake’s contribution to the text.

In spite of the general sentiment that her superiority as an art critic had been enhanced by a fortuitous marriage, the reviewers do not neglect Lady Eastlake’s own merit as a writer and art critic. She is described as having “superior powers” as a critic (Fine Arts Quarterly, 1 [1866], p. 139), as an artist of “no common powers, unsurpassed indeed in the perfection of her pencil drawings” (Edinburgh Review, 120 [1860], p. 96), as “competent in every way” to complete the task (Art-Journal, 3 [1864], p. 197), and as possessing a “spirited and graceful” writing style (Quarterly Review, 116 [1864], p. 144). Other reviewers do not distribute praise individually, but offer comparative criticism of the two writers. In the course of this comparative process Jameson tends to emerge as the writer with talent, sentiment and the ability to select popular and

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useful material, while Lady Eastlake is deservedly credited with superior critical skills, greater depth of knowledge and, of course, better access to works of art.

A further difficulty inherent in the reviewing of this text is the ownership of the text itself. Periodicals like the Art-Journal, for example, which had a recent history of contact with Jameson, may have felt more sympathetic to her part in the project. The Art-Journal is complimentary regarding Lady Eastlake’s completion of the work but unlike any other review, laments that Jameson did not finish the work personally. The reviewer writes, “we should have been pleased to know that Mrs. Jameson had lived to complete what she had so well begun and almost carried through, and to enjoy all the honour that associates her name with the History of Christian Art” (3 [1864], p. 197). The Dublin Review also tends toward congratulating Jameson as the instigator of the work, but its reviewer is biased in favour of Jameson on account of Lady Eastlake’s overt Protestantism. The Fine Arts Quarterly Review distributes praise evenly, and is the only review to provide a comprehensive overview of the series, Jameson’s credentials as an art critic, and her contribution to the present volume (1 [1866], p. 139). The Quarterly Review, with which Lady Eastlake had a lengthy and harmonious association as a reviewer, expresses gratitude to Lady Eastlake for the adoption of a chronological structure, and continues the review as if the work were hers alone. Many of the reviews list the publication as being “Commenced by the late Mrs. Jameson; continued and completed by Lady Eastlake”, with several thereafter referring to the text as “Lady Eastlake’s History of Our Lord”. Only the Gentleman’s Magazine heads its review, “THE HISTORY OF OUR LORD, BY LADY EASTLAKE” (17 [1864]). One of the few papers to review this work was the London Times, whose reviewer is extremely decisive on the issue of authorship, writing:

The volumes to which we are now calling attention are far more Lady Eastlake’s than Mrs. Jameson’s. The latter projected the work and wrote some of its chapters; but the former has so fully entered into the spirit of the original plan and has done so much to carry it out ... that she is entitled to the chief honours of the authorship. (19 May 1864, p. 7)

He/she later directly refers to the work as “Lady Eastlake’s couple of volumes” (p. 9). The Edinburgh Review likewise implies that Lady Eastlake very satisfactorily completes the set (120 [1864], p. 114).

The ambivalence of the reviewers is understandable considering their emphasis on the unity of the text. In terms of Jameson’s contribution to art criticism, however, the unity of the series takes precedence, and this is generally interrupted by Lady Eastlake’s amendments in spite of any benefits to the individual work.

The preface to History of Our Lord, composed by Lady Eastlake, explains the circumstances surrounding Jameson’s death and the posthumous compilation of this work. According to Lady Eastlake, the partially completed manuscript contained “no programme of subjects” or illustrations. Nor did it indicate how


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the work was to proceed beyond what Jameson had done before her death (pp. v-vi). These comments conflict, however, with a passage composed by Lady Eastlake in the course of the labour:

Mrs. J’s order ... is beyond all praise, and much facilitates the work. Her sisters and Mr. Longman are rather frightened at the difficulty of selecting illustrations, but that’s the pleasantest & easiest part in my view, especially as Mrs. J has left notes and specimens from which she was to have made a selection. (Eastlake Smith, Journals, pp. 136-137)

As a general guideline, Jameson had included in her notes a suggested order for the work, with “Ideal and Devotional Subjects” first, “Scriptural History of Christ’s Life” second, and finally, “Types from the Old Testament”. Yet Lady Eastlake boldly assures the reader that “Jameson surely would have diverted from this plan”, thus justifying her own decision to reorganise the text chronologically. She also increases the number of subjects, and omits deliberately a section planned by Jameson regarding Roman mosaics, on the grounds that “better writing exists” (Jameson, History, p. vi).

Lady Eastlake’s revisions are significant for a number of reasons. Her chronological organisation results in a marked deviation from the system employed by Jameson in the first three works of the series. Thus, History of Our Lord stands apart from Legends of the Monastic Orders, Sacred and Legendary Art and Legends of the Madonna as quite a different sort of work. Had Lady Eastlake adhered to Jameson’s outline, she would have maintained greater consistency and cohesion with the three earlier volumes. Instead, History of Our Lord reflects Lady Eastlake’s assumption that Jameson was working on her manuscript in the order in which the sections were to be published. Given the existence of three completed volumes already following a similar format to that suggested by Jameson in her notes, it would appear that Jameson was working “out of order” for reasons best known to herself. It is probable, however, that she was expending her limited time and energy on subjects less well known to her. That is, the manuscript work completed by Jameson comprises mainly unrehearsed material. With few exceptions (such as minor references to the Virgin Mary), the sections completed by Jameson before her death explore themes new to the Sacred and Legendary Art series. Indeed, a number of sections written by Lady Eastlake, notably those concerning Mary Magdalene and the Virgin, are ones Jameson could have accomplished with ease based on her extensive treatment of these subjects in Sacred and Legendary Art and Legends of the Madonna.

Of course, had Lady Eastlake not undertaken the completion of the text, the sections composed by Jameson may never have been published. Yet the dearth of scholarship concerning this text compared with others in the series, except for Legends of the Monastic Orders, which still requires further examination, may be the result of History of Our Lord emerging as a unique text, quite separate from the others.

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Lady Eastlake’s editorial choices also affect the placement of Jameson’s material within the text. Sections written by Jameson and inserted by Lady Eastlake are indicated by the use of square brackets and the initials “AJ” at the commencement of such text. Hence, they are easily distinguished and can be isolated from the sections composed by Lady Eastlake, though one reviewer complains that this “mode of editing is rather detrimental to the unity of a book” (Spectator, 37 [1864], p. 939). As the organisation of the published work is chronological, the first piece of writing by Jameson does not appear until well into the first volume (p. 91 of the 1890 edition). In volume one, Jameson’s contributions appear as two distinct parts, the first referring to events from the Old Testament, the second covering the gospels from Christ’s childhood, his miracles and parables. Christ’s conception, birth and death are not dealt with, but as this material is treated comprehensively in Legends of the Madonna, Jameson could have substantially reproduced the relevant material. In volume two, only four pages of text by Jameson are included under the subheading, “History of the True Cross”. Volume two is almost entirely Lady Eastlake’s work, with the exception of sporadic references to Sacred and Legendary Art or Legends of the Madonna [3], and two lists entitled “BIBLIA PAUPERUM” (Bible of the Poor) and “SPECULUM HUMANÆ SALVATIONIS” (Mirror of Human Salvation), referring to late medieval illustrative sources.[4]

Where Jameson’s text is included in History of Our Lord, the writing style is rather disjointed, which may be the result of the sections being lifted from her notebooks in toto. However, it is pithy and entertaining, and rather succinct in its unedited form. As one reviewer observes, “such passages were [probably] memoranda ... and not intended for publication exactly as they stood” (Spectator, 37 [1864], p. 939). Although many of her works provide examples of this type of writing, in only one other work, A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London (1842), is this style prevalent. This altered approach to criticism late in her career is indicative of the confidence and authority Jameson had gained in the field of art history.

While early in her career she was overtly conscious of her unproven status as a writer on art, by the 1840s Jameson was confident enough to criticise even the work of institutions like Sir Joshua Reynolds. Writes Jameson in her Handbook to the Public Galleries of Reynolds’s Holy Family, “this picture in pleasing as a scene of domestic life, but utterly deficient in the elevated historical feeling which ought to belong to the sacredness of the subject; call it an aged peasant and his family, and it may pass” (Jameson, Handbook, p. 98). With reference to Reynolds’s Infant Samuel, she adds, “apparently a study from nature, which Sir Joshua has been pleased to dignify or sanctify with this title: call it a little boy saying his prayers ... there is nothing here of the incipient prophet” (pp. 151-152).

Jameson’s insistence upon historical and biblical accuracy tends to conflict with Lady Eastlake’s point of view. For example, Jameson criticises several


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paintings for depicting Rebekah, the Old Testament figure, riding an animal other than a camel. She writes, “with the early painters, to whom camels were not familiar things, the Eastern camel becomes a horse or an ass” (p. 148), adding, “I must again observe, that in the chapter of Genesis which contains the story of Rebekah, it is expressly said that she journeyed from Padam-aram on a camel” (p. 148). She further complains that a painter from the Paul Veronese school “is ignorant of the character of the locality, and ... perfectly indifferent as to the propriety of costume ... Isaac is dressed like a Venetian cavalier” (p. 146). Similarly, in her notes on Hagar, Abraham’s mistress, who bore him the illegitimate son, Ishmael, Jameson is critical of works containing inappropriately represented shrubbery and boy models of an unsuitable age. By comparison, Lady Eastlake declares in the same volume that truth to reality in religious art is unnecessary. She writes:

The lover of art and adorer of Christ [need not] care about inconsistencies in minor matters. As, for example, that the entombment takes place in a renaissance monument, in the centre of a beautiful Italian landscape, and not in a cave in a rock in the arid scenery of Judea. On the contrary, it is right that Art should exercise the utmost possible freedom in such circumstances, which are the signs and handwriting of different schools and times ... It is the moral expression that touches the heart and adorns the tale, not the architecture or costume. (Jameson, History, p. 7)

This is rather an extraordinary position for Lady Eastlake to take in the introduction, given her apparently unshakeable opinion stated elsewhere in the volumes concerning scriptural authenticity in art. Such a perspective, of course, limits her approbation to “Protestant” subjects, symbols and sacraments, a fact that earns her the consternation of at least one reviewer. He/she suggests that she “inquire at some Catholic source” prior to condemning “profane” objects in art in order to “save her Catholic readers some unnecessary pain” (Dublin Review, 3 [1864], p. 419).

Lady Eastlake’s insistence on the use of Scripture to authenticate religious subjects in art is a matter of little consequence to Jameson, who was ever ready to discuss scriptural and legendary subjects with equal interest. In all her “Sacred Art” volumes, Jameson circumvents the issue of denomination in religious art criticism. In Legends of the Madonna she writes:

It has been impossible to treat of the representations of the Blessed Virgin without touching on doctrines such as constitute the principal differences between the creeds of Christendom. I have had to ascend most perilous heights, to dive into terribly obscure depths. Not for worlds would I be guilty of a scoffing allusion to any belief or any object held sacred by sincere and earnest hearts; but neither has it been possible for me to write in a tone of acquiescence, where I altogether differ in feeling and opinion. On this point I shall need, and feel sure that I shall obtain, the generous construction of readers of all persuasions. (p. xvi)

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In spite of her stand, the Fine Arts Quarterly Review reviewer praises History of Our Lord in the context of concern for the earlier volumes. He /she writes:

No sublimer or more universally acceptable theme could be imagined, and, at the same time, one which would have been open as daylight and free from those difficulties of a theological nature which had so seriously imperilled the former portion [of Jameson’s series]. (1 [1866], p. 135)

While the notion of the first three volumes being “imperilled” is dubious given Jameson’s sensitivity, it is worthy of note that Lady Eastlake’s more stringent position excites Catholic and non-Catholic reviewers alike into publishing declarations concerning the relative merits of introducing Christianity into the criticism of religious art.

The reviews tend to fall into three distinct categories on the point of religion in art. First, there are those advocating a Catholic approach, secondly, those exercising Protestant sympathies, and finally, a minority stressing the importance of artistic Taste, whatever the depicted subject. While the debate is complex and lengthy, excerpts representing the extremes of the debate can define the boundaries. The Dublin Review reviewer declares:

The Catholic Church is at once the parent, historically, of all Christian art, and the upholder of that grand principle of tradition, which gives to art, no less than to doctrine, a range far wider and more ample than the mere letter of the Biblical records. (3 [1864], p. 407)

This reviewer goes on to state vehemently that outside the Bible there is no infallible source to which Lady Eastlake can apply, and that, therefore, she is destined to “impose her own judgment”. He/she concludes:

So effectually does Protestantism interfere with the capacity of a critic to appreciate the higher developments and fuller expression of Christian Art ... [because] he lacks a clue to it as a whole ... Both Protestant and unbeliever must therefore labour under much vagueness and uncertainty of judgment, inasmuch as they can have no fixity of principle. (p. 408)

The Quarterly Review argues the opposite extreme, not surprisingly in support of Lady Eastlake’s own sentiments. The reviewer writes:

Nothing can be truer than the fact which this work steadily exemplifies, viz. That the interests of Christian art and the integrity of Scripture are indissolubly united. Art, truly understood, is inveterately Protestant. Her inherent laws offer one constant appeal against all adulteration of the Truth. Legend never approaches the person of our Saviour except to degrade it, or to set up a rival in importance to it. (116 [1864], p. 175)

The writer for the London Times succinctly observes that, “if Lady Eastlake has one fault, it is one which Protestants will easily forgive, and may commend – she is determined to identify orthodoxy with good taste” (19 May 1864, p. 7). He/she later adds:


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Although Lady Eastlake carries the principle too far, she is right in the main. It is not safe for the artist to add to the scriptural record. We who abide by the letter of Scripture can take but very imperfect interest in descriptions which rest on less than canonical authority. (p. 8)

The reviewer for the Edinburgh Review is representative of those concerned with artistic taste rather than religious accuracy. He/she states, “If faith alone is to draw the line between that which is of Art and that which is of superstition, we run some risk of applying a test of theology instead of a canon of taste” (120 [1864], p. 99). Jameson’s position is most commensurate with this third type of review, given her secular perspective, and her focus on the development of artistic taste expressed as early as 1849 in the Art-Journal (Jameson, “Some Thoughts on Art”, p. 103).

Jameson was acutely aware of the sensitive nature of publishing religious art criticism at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment prevailed. In the 1840s, it was feared that sympathy with early Italian art would lead to an affinity with the Roman Catholic faith, an impression discouraged by non-Catholic art critics.[5] Hilary Fraser notes that Jameson’s study of Christian iconography may have been influenced by a surge of public interest in early Italian artworks. She observes that “although Jameson was not herself a Catholic, and maintained a historical distance from the religious art about which she wrote, she was ... interested in tracing the influence of the Christian faith on the history of art” (Fraser, The Victorians in Renaissance Italy, p. 99).

Judith Johnston argues convincingly that Jameson refutes “papist labelling, or any sectarian labelling at all, preferring that [her] work be read as secular rather than [as] containing any form of religious bias” (Johnston, Anna Jameson, p. 36). Jameson herself recognised the danger, commenting, “piety in art – poetry in art – Puseyism in art, – let us be careful how we confound them” (Jameson, Memoirs and Essays, p. 30).

Jameson suspends any personal religious views in order to deal with material with which she does not expressly agree, but with which, from the perspective of a critic and social commentator, she is able to sympathise. It is not her purpose to enter into a religious debate, as is clear from her refusal to establish Legends of the Madonna as a platform for religious argument. Her purpose is to circumvent theological dogma as completely as possible. This is not to say that the reviewers are incorrect in their estimation of History of Our Lord as an overtly “Protestant” text. In so far as they are justified in that observation, however, such “Protestantism” is attributable to Lady Eastlake rather than to Jameson, and, further, may be a greater reflection of English Victorian sentiment than of either author’s perspective. The Art-Journal observes that “it is a remarkable fact that [England is] almost the only country where ... Sacred Art, strictly so-called, has never been naturalised, as if Protestantism had no sort of fellowship with it” (3 [1864], p. 197). Considering Sheridan Gilley’s observation that “the appropriation of Catholic art to an end not Catholic” was

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“characteristically Victorian” (“Victorian Feminism and Catholic Art”, p. 391), it could be argued that to the extent that sacred art was “naturalised” in nineteenth-century England, non-Catholic critics played a significant part.[6]

The History of Our Lord is a valuable text to critics of both Jameson and Eastlake. However, the inability to attribute the text substantially to either author, added to the religious furore it engendered, may account for its neglect. In addition, Lady Eastlake’s perceived superiority as an art critic in comparison to Jameson seems to have led scholars concerned with Lady Eastlake to consider this text as a mildly embarrassing favour, not worthy of vigorous academic appraisal. From the viewpoint of Jameson scholars, Jameson’s contribution to History of Our Lord may have appeared so slight as to not warrant extensive analysis. Indeed, in spite of its being Jameson’s coup de grâce, the finished product is a work rewritten by Lady Eastlake with comments by Jameson inserted, rather than a text written by Jameson and edited by Lady Eastlake.

Yet in terms of Jameson’s corpus, History of Our Lord is extremely revealing with regard to her altered and altering perspective on the fine arts. In the Diary she struggled to reconcile her desire for truth in art with her views on feminine subject matter, both for the female artist and art critic. By the late 1850s, though still grappling with her feminine sensibilities, Jameson had moved toward reserving her approbation for historically and culturally authentic representations in art.[7] The first hint of this bolder approach to art criticism comes in the 1840s and 1850s with her gallery guides. Lady Eastlake, too, is forthright in her art criticism in the 1850s, publicly taking Ruskin to task for inconsistencies in Modern Painters (Eastlake, “Modern Painters”, pp. 81-136).[8] Perhaps it was no accident that these emboldened, established female writers united in the completion of History of Our Lord at the commencement of the 1860s; a decade renowned for the advancement of art criticism.

Correspondence

Dr Ainslie Robinson, Department of English, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. ([email protected]).

Notes

[1] Franz Kugler, 1808-1858.

[2] See also Adele Holcomb’s register of surprise at Steegman’s claims (Holcomb, “Sacred Art and Social Vision”, pp. 117-118).

[3] On at least one occasion, Lady Eastlake incorrectly refers to Legends of the Madonna as “History of the Madonna”.

[4] The Fine Arts Quarterly Review describes the illustrations in the BIBLIA PAUPERUM as “primitive wood engravings” (1 [1866], p. 136). However, this


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description is incorrect given that wood-engraving was not developed until about 1800 (Bliss, A History of Wood, p. 2).

[5] Ruskin, an anti-Catholic, faced such problems in his championing of early Italian “Christian” art (cf. Fraser, The Victorians in Renaissance Italy).

[6] See J.B. Bullen for Jameson’s role in the translation of sacred art for a Protestant readership (The Myth of the Renaissance, p. 112).

[7] This may in part account for the Pre-Raphaelite interest in Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, especially that of D.G. Rossetti (cf. Ludley, “Anne Jameson and D.G. Rossetti”).

[8] See her anonymous review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Quarterly Review, March 1856.

Works Cited

Bliss, Douglas Percy, A History of Wood-Engraving (London: Spring Books, 1928).

Bullen, J.B., The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, “Modern Painters”, in Prose by Victorian Women, ed. A. Bloomfield & S. Mitchell (London: Garland, 1996), pp. 81-136.

Eastlake Smith, Charles (Ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1895).

Ernstrom, Adele M., “‘Equally Lenders and Borrowers in Turn’: The Working and Married Lives of the Eastlakes”, Art History, 15 (1992), pp. 470-485.

Fraser, Hilary D., The Victorians in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

Gilley, Sheridan, “Victorian Feminism and Catholic Art: The Case of Mrs Jameson”. Summer Meeting, Ecclesiastical Historical Society, Bishop Otter College, 1990, pp. 381-391.

Haskell, Francis, Rediscoveries in Art (London: Phaidon, 1976).

Holcomb, Adele M., “Anna Jameson 1794-1860: Sacred Art and Social Vision”, in Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979, ed. Adele M. Holcomb & C.S. Richter (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), pp. 93-121.

Holcomb, Adele M., “Anna Jameson: The First Professional English Art Historian”, Art History, 6 (1983), pp. 171-187.

Jameson, Anna, A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London, with catalogues of the pictures, accompanied by critical, historical and biographical notices, and copious indexes to facilitate reference (London: John Murray, 1842).

Jameson, Anna (1864) The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art, vol. 1 (London: Longmans Green, 1890).

Jameson, Anna (1852) Legends of the Madonna: As Represented in the Fine Arts (London: Longmans Green, 1891).

Jameson, Anna, Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals (London: Longmans, 1855).

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Jameson, Anna, “Some Thoughts on Art Addressed to the Uninitiated”, The Art-Journal, 2 (1849), pp. 103-105.

Johnston, Judith, “Fracturing Perspectives in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826)”, “Radical Cultures (1815-51). Romanticism to Victorianism?” Centre for Victorian Studies Conference, University of Leeds, 13-15 July 1998.

Johnston, Judith, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997).

Lochhead, Marion, Elizabeth Rigby: Lady Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1961).

Ludley, David A., “Anna Jameson and D.G. Rossetti: His Use of Her Histories”, Woman’s Art Journal, 12 (1991-92), pp. 29-33.

Steegman, John, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830-1870 (Boston: MIT Press, 1970).

Reviews Cited

“Christian Art”, Dublin Review, 3 (1864), pp. 402-421.

“The History of Our Lord, by Lady Eastlake”, Gentleman’s Magazine, 17 (1864), pp. 169-180.

“The History of Our Lord”, London Quarterly Review, 23 (1864-65), pp. 416-452.

“The History of Our Lord”, Spectator, 37 (1864), p. 939.

“The History of Our Lord”, The Art-Journal, 3 (1864), pp. 197-198.

“The History of Our Lord”, The Athenaeum, 19 May 1864, pp. 667-668.

“The History of Our Lord”, London Times, 19 May 1864, p. 7.

“The History of Our Lord”, Quarterly Review, 116 (1864), pp. 143-177.

“The History of Our Lord”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 96 (1864), pp. 573-589.

“The History of Our Lord”, Edinburgh Review, 120 (1864), pp. 94-114.

“The History of Our Lord”, Fine Arts Quarterly Review, 1 (1866), pp. 132-144.


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the history of our lord as exemplified in works of art : anna jameson's coup de grâce

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