Art for the Nation. The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World

Abstract

Lady Eastlake (1809–93) would have been utterly horrified to find her face gazing out from the front cover of this volume, with her beloved Sir Charles relegated unceremoniously to the rear. When her husband was awarded his honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1853, she was acutely embarrassed by the Public Orator’s reference to his ‘most famous wife’, deeming it inappropriate for there to be any mention of herself in the context of her husband’s achievements. Clearly, her appearance as cover-girl represents a marketing decision, rather than the authors’ choice, but this prominence given to the wife, rather than the husband, reflects the authors’ view that Elizabeth Eastlake – née Rigby – has so far tended to take centre stage, earning rather more credit than she deserves in relation to the National Gallery. Certainly, it is easy to be distracted by the colourful character of Lady Eastlake – evolving from the wittily outspoken young woman who could hold her own with publishers Murray and Lockhart, into the feisty champion of Effie in the great Ruskin marriage debacle, and finally into a crochety grande dame, pressurizing politicians to do her bidding after her husband’s death. Nicknamed ‘Lofty Lucy’, and a veritable ‘Doric pillar’ of a woman (according to Sara Coleridge), she has tended to stand head and shoulders above her husband in terms of biographical interest, just as she did in physical stature. Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), by contrast, a restrained and modest figure, offers less in the way of dramatic potential, and so has been left relatively unrecognized for the enormous changes he wrought in the national art scene – as President of the Royal Academy from 1850, and as first Director of the National Gallery from 1855.