George Eliot, Lady Eastlake, and the Humbug of Old Masters

Glossing an entry in George Eliot’s journal where she records her reaction to paintings by Rubens in Antwerp provides an opportunity to consider the commonplaces and conventions that informed writing about art in the mid-nineteenth century and the place of two uncommonly gifted women as contributors to the discourse of the arts at that time. The paper asks what constituted ‘humbug’ in relation to old masters and what might be regarded as humdrum in their appreciation. In many ways contrasting figures, as authors, George Eliot and Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake manifest the manifold voices of woman writers and the multiple possibilities for writing about art historically. Rigorous researchers, acute observers, and keen literary stylists, they were serious, passionate, and humorous. Both wrote for different purposes and in different genres in ways that allow for an exploration of the degree to which a ‘woman’s experience and observations bring within her special knowledge’ (to quote George Eliot once again), or rather that they might bring special knowledge to a developing and debated realm of knowledge.