Elizabeth Eastlake

Eastlake wrote extensively about art. Julie Sheldon in The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake has compiled a full bibliography. Some highlights are: Reviews of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, in the Quarterly Review vol. 84, 1848 – notorious for her critical view of Jane Eyre. 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’. 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". 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". Ruskin has confused poetry and painting: whereas poetry uses signs to express thought, painting depicts things. Photography, in the Quarterly Review, vol. 101, 1857, is one of the earliest commentaries on the photographic art form. Some have argued that she denies 'works of light' a place among the fine arts. 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". "For everything for which Art has hitherto been the means, but not the end, photography is the allotted agent", 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). She helped 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, and Marion Lochhead regards Eastlake as a 'pioneer of feminine journalism'. She is considered to be one of the most important female 19th-century art historians along with Anna Jameson and Emilia Dilke. More critically, Janice Schroeder decries her values supporting women's subordinate place in the class structure within British imperialism.