1. Anna Jameson and the claims of art criticism in nineteenth-century England

Benjamin Dabby

As far as Daniel Deniehy (1828–1865) was concerned, Anna Jameson (1794–1860) was one of England’s most important women of letters, and he praised her criticism of art above all. She was, lectured this Australian man of letters after Jameson’s death in 1860, ‘as true and as thorough when she looked at historical fresco or at portrait, as William Hazlitt’ (1778–1830).¹ The comparison between Jameson and Hazlitt was also made by Hazlitt’s eponymous son and was repeated across the nineteenth century, suggesting a widespread understanding of Jameson’s important role in promoting and professionalizing art criticism in nineteenth-century England.² Jameson, however, did more to professionalize and to popularize art criticism than her predecessor, in part because Hazlitt worried that a popular appreciation of art might herald civilizational decline. He had been torn between the idea that art could ‘convey certain ideas … to the eye and mind of all’³ and a suspicion that attempting to democratize aesthetic taste incurred a moral and social risk. ‘The diffusion of taste’, he wrote, ‘is not, then, the same thing as the improvement of taste … which can only be decided upon by the most refined understandings.’⁴ The claim that the cultivation of a people’s aesthetic taste jeopardized their moral and social progress and that only an elite few were capable of ‘refined understandings’ was made at greater length by Jameson’s contemporary Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–93). Eastlake played an important role in developing art connoisseurship as the means of cultivating aesthetic taste for an elite few prepared to dedicate themselves to the training she offered in the pages of the Quarterly Review, in which she wrote for almost fifty years.⁵ For Jameson, however, Eastlake’s model of art connoisseurship limited art’s potential to effect moral and social improvement, and this chapter examines the pivotal contribution Jameson made to a different method of art criticism’s professionalization in nineteenth-century England, which entailed much bolder claims for its potential to improve the nation and saw her challenge contemporary definitions of connoisseurial authority itself.

Jameson’s career as an art critic and the claims she made for art’s moral and social power were made possible by the dramatic expansion of the periodical press and the popular publishing industry in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This expansion presented a greater opportunity for ambitious women to earn a living by writing in a range of publications widely understood to be important sources of self-improvement.⁶ The number of women and men writing across a range of periodicals grew even more from mid-century onwards, following the repeal of the stamp tax in 1855 and the paper tax in 1861, making literary production cheaper, and these publications were able to reach larger audiences thanks to improved literacy and advertising.⁷ Linda H. Peterson has shown that ‘[p]rofessional women of letters emerged, as a group, simultaneously with their male counterparts’ at this time, constructing identities of professional authorship which reflected and perpetuated their cultural authority.⁸ This process of literary professionalization saw women writers negotiating gender stereotypes of men’s and women’s intellectual and moral characteristics. Some decided to degender these characteristics for the most part, arguing that the careful cultivation of expertise was as open to talented women as it was to talented men. As Sidney Smith had argued in the pages of the Edinburgh Review as early as 1810:

[a] great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women … All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and women we every day meet with, every body, we suppose, must perceive; but there is none surely which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind.⁹

Eastlake made this degendering of talent an important basis for her cultural authority and status as a professional woman of letters, as did other women of letters throughout the century. Jameson, however, saw an advantage in a gendered discourse quick to praise women’s special capacity for moral sympathy and men’s worrisome proclivity for vainglory, and in contrast to histories which place professional women of letters on the margins of nineteenth-century art criticism, this chapter shows how its practice was gendered by its most successful pioneer, who portrayed male critics as often focused on irrelevant and rarefied cultures.¹⁰

Anna Jameson was hailed as England’s answer to France’s pre-eminent woman of letters, Germaine de Staël, thanks to the critical esteem her literary moralism and travel writing of the 1820s and 1830s had earned. Her pioneering art criticism also began in these decades and rested on a claim to have mastered the critical faculty of ‘disinterestedness’. She presented this faculty as the basis of any meaningful appreciation of art’s moral power and degendered it by arguing that only women and men who possessed reason and sensibility in equal balance and were thus disinterested were able to understand and benefit from the moral power of visual art. Without it they were likely to succumb to the emotionalism that was sometimes described as typical of women or to the vanity which Jameson pointed out was often typical of men. This was the basis of her claim to practise a new professional standard of art criticism: one predicated on her disinterested expert evaluations of paintings and their moral power, and on her superior standing outside patriarchal male institutions such as the Royal Academy. In this context, Jameson’s decision to invite comparison between herself and de Staël was carefully made; de Staël’s writings, Eastlake later wrote, ‘cannot be pronounced to be either masculine or feminine, abounding as they do in … the qualities of sound and impartial judgment, and true and exact definitions’.¹¹ Jameson was willing to take advantage of the intuitive sensibility conventionally ascribed to women, as well as the feminine register available to her, but her claim to have superseded gendered stereotypes authorized her art criticism and allowed her to position herself as the empowered successor to eighteenth-century moralists such as de Staël or indeed Hazlitt.

Jameson’s professionalization of art criticism therefore saw her actively involved in constructing a gendered professional persona which was widely appreciated. Although she did not use the term ‘professional’ to describe herself, her contemporaries did, using it to denote the depth and breadth of her expertise as well as her commercial success as a critic. The Literary Gazette, for instance, referred to her as a ‘professional writer’, and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine called her a ‘professional author’.¹² She earned ‘a very high rank as Art-critic’, declared another periodical, deeming her a critic of ‘taste and genius’ next to whom ‘Passavant is dull, Kugler an encumbrance, and Waagen unmistakably a bore’.¹³ This contrast in Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine between the democratic and accessible claims of Jameson’s art criticism and the standard of elite connoisseurship promoted by the German art critics Johann Passavant (1787–1861), Gustav Waagen (1794–1868) and Franz Theodor Kugler (1808–1858) illustrates the important divergence in the claims of art criticism in this period, in which connoisseurship is sometimes seen as representative of the marginalization of women of letters as art critics. Jameson, however, played an important role in popularizing an awareness of German art critics in Victorian Britain by redefining connoisseurship in art as a skill accessible to a much wider audience of male and female middle-class readers; the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) averred that ‘he had learned “not a little” from Jameson’s articles in the Penny Magazine’, suggesting that her criticism was probably ‘influential for the whole Early Christian phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ itself.¹⁴ Jameson’s art criticism, then, undoubtedly appealed to male and female readers alike, and this was demonstrated by the popularity of her art guides and histories, alongside her contributions to major periodicals such as the Athenaeum, the Penny Magazine, the English Woman’s Journal, the New Monthly Magazine and Samuel Carter Hall’s Art-Journal.¹⁵ Indeed, it was Jameson who opened the Art-Journal’s issue of 1 March 1849. We ‘are to have Art it seems for the million’, she declared, positioning herself ‘between the public and the artist as a sort of interpreter’, ready to teach her readers to ‘learn to distinguish … merely conventional taste from the really purified perception of the Beautiful, which leads us through the love of Art to the love of Nature, and from Nature up to God’.¹⁶

The wider context in which Jameson worked reveals the variety of methods of art criticism in nineteenth-century England and the differences between her own background and that of her contemporaries. Jameson had had to work for a living since she was a teenager because her father, Denis Brownell Murphy, was a poorly paid miniature painter. It was his insecure income that prompted him to leave Dublin for England in 1798 in search of more work, and by the time his daughter Anna was sixteen she had started work as a governess to the marquess of Winchester’s children. From then onwards it was fifteen years of work as a governess for several employers, until her marriage to the lawyer Robert Jameson in 1825.¹⁷ Other professional women of letters did not have to work so hard for a living from such a young age. Jameson’s contemporary Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), for example, who would go on to become a widely esteemed historian of medieval England, came from a more secure financial background: her grandfather John Stafford was the minister of the New Broad Street Independent Chapel from 1738 to his death in 1799, catering to a wealthy community of Congregationalist dissenters.¹⁸ Her later career encompassed not only medieval history but a wide remit of cultural criticism, including a regular unsigned column as an art critic for over twenty years in the British Quarterly Review.¹⁹ The periodical was an important site for the formation of a new class of professional male and female critics in nineteenth-century England, and here the different claims Lawrance made illustrate the diversity of women of letters’ contribution to art criticism’s professionalization at this time.²⁰ Lawrance moved easily from reviews that provided succinct distillations of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic philosophy to articles that corrected the more egregious errors she found in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60).²¹ She had built her own reputation for disinterested expertise as an historian and, like Jameson, she eschewed restrictive gender models in her art criticism.²² But she complicated the claims Jameson made for art’s moral power by setting strict utilitarian criteria under which art could be used to elevate the nation. She argued that art was a secondary source of moral improvement and that only a system of education which ‘precedes art, and is distinct from it’ could secure its beneficial effect.²³ The claims she made for art’s power to improve society therefore relied much more heavily on guidance from elite connoisseurs such as her or her more famous contemporary Elizabeth Eastlake.

Figure 1.2. After David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake, carbon print, 1843–8 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Eastlake’s father was the prosperous gentleman farmer and physician Edward Rigby, and her career was also made in the pages of a prestigious periodical, the Quarterly Review. Her tenure as its standing art critic was built on her scholarly translation into English of Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England (1836).²⁴ She married the Royal Academician Charles Eastlake in 1849 and, as Hilary Fraser has pointed out, she and her new husband entertained Gustav Waagen along with her friend Anna Jameson the following year, before Elizabeth ‘transmitted his work to a British readership through her translation in three volumes of his Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854)’.²⁵ But the friendship between Eastlake and Jameson did not obscure the different claims they made for art criticism. Like her husband, Elizabeth Eastlake claimed that art connoisseurship was a difficult science, in contrast to Jameson’s claims for its easily accessible moral benefits.²⁶ In Eastlake’s case, her route to the status of a professional art critic was through her masterful assessments and translations of Passavant, Waagen and Kugler; she became a major proponent of the concerns later associated with aesthetic claims of ‘art for art’s sake’ later in the century.²⁷ But she acknowledged an intellectual debt to Jameson, who had done so much to raise the profile of art criticism and art history, and she completed her friend’s final work of art history, The History of Our Lord (1864), after Jameson died in 1860.²⁸ Jameson had played a vital role in making an ‘educated taste’ in art accessible through her scholarly but readable guides, which earned her widespread critical esteem and allowed her to contest the gendered terms John Ruskin used to dismiss female art historians, further demonstrating the diverse ways in which women of letters contributed to the professionalization of art criticism in nineteenth-century England.

Daniel Deniehy’s tribute to Anna Jameson would have left her with mixed feelings, had she known of it. On the one hand, the comparison of her art criticism and William Hazlitt’s recognized her status as a literary professional and the case that each of them had made for disinterested cultural criticism; Hazlitt had maintained that the mind was naturally disinterested in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805).²⁹ On the other hand, the assertions of his art criticism were precisely what she believed her own art criticism had superseded. Both had taken advantage of a growing appetite for guides to art collections, fostered by the prevalent belief in visual art as a source of moral truth. Hazlitt’s criticism appeared in articles for the London Magazine and the New Monthly in the early 1820s, which were collated into Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (1824). But he was uneasy about the democratization of art appreciation in which he participated, writing that ‘public taste’ was ‘necessarily vitiated, in proportion as it is public’, adding that ‘it is lowered with every infusion it receives of common opinion’.³⁰ For Hazlitt the real appreciation and understanding of art was possible only for the ‘poetic connoisseur’. Hazlitt’s connoisseur was an expert capable of ‘the most refined understandings’, which the writer declared ‘can never be properly understood by the generality of mankind’, and he warned that ‘the decay of art may be said to be the necessary consequence’ of its democratization.³¹ Jameson reacted against Hazlitt’s cultural pessimism and incarnation of the elite connoisseur, declaring in her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London (1844) that ‘Hazlitt is about as bad a guide in a picture gallery as it is possible to have’, belittling him as a ‘delightful companion’ whose encounters with Rubens or Titian leave him ‘as one intoxicated with colour, drunk with beauty’.³² In contrast to this figure of the elite male connoisseur who is, in fact, an incompetent amateur, she offered an alternative model of the expert critic whose scholarly historicist criticism did not come at the expense of easily comprehensible training in aesthetic taste.

There was considerable demand for an alternative to Hazlitt’s brand of rarefied connoisseurship, not least among readers disaffected by the gendered assumptions on which his claims rested: Hazlitt had ‘never met with any woman who could reason’, he wrote in a Saturday edition of the Morning Chronicle in 1813.³³ This helps to explain the sustained appeal of Anna Jameson’s art criticism and histories. In these she disproved Hazlitt’s denigration of a woman’s intellectual potential and argued against the idea that art’s popularization might render it an agent of social decay. She turned to this in her first major publication, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), which began to establish her expertise and to advance democratic arguments for the power of art to improve society; it was, reflected the Art-Journal’s editor Samuel Carter Hall later in the century, ‘the groundwork of her reputation’.³⁴ The intellectual basis of her expertise was clear from its literary form of a diary, which was a tribute to de Staël’s Corinne (1807). In Corinne de Staël demonstrated women’s ability to master the arts of culture and conversation and to do so independently of men. By drawing on her own experience of touring Europe with the Rowles family in the early 1820s, Jameson displayed her own knowledge and appreciation of Italian masters in contrast to a stereotype of the male ‘connoisseur’, whom she ridiculed as lost in antiquarian technicalities:

Here comes a connoisseur, who has found his way, good man! from Somerset House, to the Tribune at Florence: See him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the other extended forwards, describes certain indescribable circumvolutions in the air, and now he retires, now advances, now recedes again, till he has hit the exact distance from which every point of beauty is displayed to the best possible advantage, and there he stands – gazing, as never gazed the moon upon the waters, or love-sick maiden upon the moon! We take him perhaps for another Pygmalion? … No such thing: it is the fleshiness of the tints, the vaghezza [vagueness] of the colouring, the brilliance of the carnations, the fold of a robe, or the foreshortening of a little finger. O! whip me such connoisseurs! the critic’s stop-watch was nothing to this.

Jameson renders this male connoisseur a helpless amateur, walking backwards and forwards, waving his arms, intellectually incapable of illuminating art’s moral power. In contrast, Jameson’s narrator presents herself as uncorrupted by the male tradition represented by this connoisseur from Somerset House, home to the Royal Academy of Arts until its move to Burlington House in 1837. If she had ‘visited Italy in the character of a ready made connoisseur, I should have lost many pleasures’, she explains, adding that ‘a technical knowledge of the arts is apt to divert the mind from the general effect, to fix it on petty details of execution’.³⁵ Instead Jameson’s narrator becomes a professional guide to ‘good taste’ and ‘bad taste’ in art throughout the book,³⁶ recommending to her readers, for example, the ‘St. Sebastians of Guido and Razzi; the St. Jerome of Domenichino; the sternly beautiful Judith of Allori, the Pietà of Raffaelle; the San Pietro Martire of Titian’, which she deemed:

tragic scenes, wherein all that is revolting is kept from view, where human suffering is dignified by the moral lesson it is made to convey, and its effect on the beholder at once softened and heightened by the redeeming grace which genius and poetry have shed like a glory round it.³⁷

Notwithstanding the role of painters Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) and Mary Moser (1744–1819) as two of the founding members of the Royal Academy, Jameson’s exclusion from what had become an exclusively male site of art appreciation is presented in the Diary as the basis of her superior moral and scholarly authority as a professional critic and one to which she drew her readers’ attention, in contrast to her own professional persona.³⁸ Her later art histories repeated and expanded on the claims she first made for these works of art in the Diary³⁹ and became a standard reference for her peers engaged in art criticism, as well as more popular travel guides to Italy.⁴⁰

Jameson’s Diary also demonstrates nineteenth-century art criticism’s location in different literary genres before the development of discrete disciplinary boundaries at the end of the century. The unconventional form of the semi-autobiographical homage to de Staël’s Corinne served as an excellent vehicle for Jameson to establish her authority at a time when the status of art criticism in England was lower than it was in Germany, despite a growing belief in the power of the imagination to recognize the timeless moral truths represented in great art, whether literary or visual. Jameson’s cultural criticism encompassed literary moralism in The Loves of the Poets (1829) and Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832); art criticism in The Beauties of the Court of Charles II (1833); and wide-ranging cultural criticism and travel writing in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834), a four-volume work based on her tour of German states which also included a new edition of The Diary of an Ennuyée. German romantics such as Friedrich Schelling had developed aesthetic philosophies of nature which were increasingly familiar to English readers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, for example, had each promoted a belief in art’s moral and socially redemptive power, and Jameson had read them both in depth.⁴¹ Her publication of Visits and Sketches therefore took advantage of a growing demand for expert but accessible cultural guidance. While Coleridge, Carlyle and other Germanophiles had begun to familiarize English readers with German cultural icons such as Goethe and leading philosophers such as Schelling, it was Jameson rather than her male predecessors who made them attractive and intelligible to a wider audience in her simple expositions.⁴²

Figure 1.3. Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, oil on canvas, signed and dated 1613, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Jameson had positioned her Diary as England’s answer to de Staël’s Corinne and she laid claim to her French counterpart’s persona once again in Visits and Sketches: her account of touring Germany was recognized by her contemporaries as the British equivalent of de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which had attempted to vindicate the reputation of German culture in France.⁴³ It also consolidated Jameson’s claim to represent a new standard of professional art criticism. On the one hand, there were paeans on German culture in the manner of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) or Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836). ‘But in forming our judgment, our taste in art’, wrote Jameson in the dialogic introduction to Visits and Sketches, ‘it is unsafe to listen to opinions springing from this vague kind of enthusiasm’, echoing her caricature of the male connoisseur in the Diary.⁴⁴ On the other hand, criticism had swung in the direction of the pedantic connoisseur whose attempt to explain the moral power of art was lost in dry technicalities and stylistic differences between different artists. In place of these disobliging alternatives Jameson positioned herself as a ‘reflecting and philosophical observer’ whose expert knowledge and understanding of art, be it literary or visual, was superior to that of her contemporaries.⁴⁵

Jameson’s persona of a disinterested critic supported her claim that she was ready to teach her readers to appreciate the ‘grand universal passions, principles, and interests of human nature’ revealed by great art.⁴⁶ The ability to describe an artist’s technical skill was not enough to form an ‘educated taste’ in art, which she argued could be acquired in two ways: first, by training the mind ‘to habitual sympathy with the beautiful and the good’, and second, by historicizing the given work of art, learning a ‘knowledge of the meaning, and the comprehension of the object of the artist’.⁴⁷ The exercise of sympathy was vital to this method of art appreciation and while, conventionally, it had been ascribed to women, Jameson presented it as a human faculty that women and men had a responsibility to cultivate alongside their powers of reason. In this context she explained the moral power of Renaissance or baroque works of art she had encountered on her travels, such as Peter Paul Rubens’s Saint Teresa of Ávila Interceding for Souls in Purgatory (1630–35). Jameson’s role as a critic was to direct her readers to copies of these paintings in order to benefit from their moral power by supplying the historical context to the artist’s choice of subject. In this case, for example, she reminded readers of the religious story which Rubens’s painting represented: the moment at which Jesus answers St Teresa’s intercession on behalf of the souls in purgatory. ‘This is only one instance out of many’, she informed her readers, ‘of the moral effect which has been produced by painting’, later moving the popular travel writer Augustus Clare to point out that ‘Mrs. Jameson truly observes that “what was strong, beautiful, true, and earnest, was in Teresa herself”’, in his account of his own visit to Avila.⁴⁸

Jameson’s recognized status as a cosmopolitan professional art critic allowed her to popularize what she saw as the principles of educated taste in art: sympathy with the art’s moral message and a historically informed understanding of the artist’s choice of subject. She deemed this indispensable to positive social change, and her professional reputation by 1840 saw her editing the first edition of Robert Ralph Noel’s English translation of Gustav Waagen’s Peter Paul Rubens, His Life and Genius (1840), for which she supplied her own introduction. Notwithstanding their personal friendship, Jameson was the obvious choice for Noel, given the formidable scholarship that underpinned her professional authority, in addition to widespread approval of her status as a professional at the vanguard of art criticism.⁴⁹ By 1838 the influential Literary Gazette classed Jameson as one of the ‘professional writers’ ‘with a strong inclination towards the metaphysics of the German school’ and, while it was suspicious of this foreign influence, it praised ‘her own observant mind’, confirming that ‘we are both entertained and informed by her graphic power and cleverness’.⁵⁰ The widespread understanding of Jameson’s professional expertise bolstered her cultural authority: it ‘would be difficult now to comprehend the immense power exercised by the Literary Gazette’ from the 1820s to the 1840s, Hall reflected in the late 1870s, adding that ‘an author’s fame was established when he had obtained the praise of that journal’.⁵¹ The Athenaeum also lauded Jameson, and its reviewer Allan Cunningham singled out her introduction to Waagen’s work as particularly important, declaring it ‘especially valuable for its philosophic criticism – a rare merit in these days’.⁵² This was probably gratifying to Jameson, given that her own praise of Waagen as ‘an enlightened and philosophical critic’ repeated the terms she had used to describe her own work in Visits and Sketches, republished in 1837 as Sketches of Germany: Art – Literature – Character.⁵³ Once again she had distinguished her criticism from that of the hapless critics of old, lost as they were in discussions of ‘the petty details of execution’ of the given artist. ‘What shall be said’, she asked, ‘of that torrent of shallow conventional verbiage which is poured upon us from day to day and from year to year, and which calls itself criticism?’, before continuing to emphasize the importance she attached to sympathy with a painting’s subject:

To know what a picture represents, and with what degree of propriety and success it is represented, may be sufficient critical skill for the consideration of nine-tenths of the pictures which yearly cover the walls of our Academy; but to enable us to appreciate the creations of genius, and to reap all the pleasure and improvement which art can bestow, we must go far higher and far deeper.

Art criticism in England was in a poor state, and it was up to Jameson to improve the nation’s taste in art if it was to benefit from the ‘many-sided and elevated spirit in criticism with which the Germans have long been familiar’.⁵⁴

There was an alternative to the method of art criticism espoused by Jameson, which her younger contemporary and friend Elizabeth Eastlake played an increasingly important role in articulating by mid-century. Known as Elizabeth Rigby until her marriage to Charles Eastlake in 1849, Elizabeth’s route to the status of a professional critic also went through Germany. There she had spent two years learning German in Heidelberg, leading to her translation of the German art historian Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England.⁵⁵ But Eastlake tended to present her method of art criticism as considerably harder to acquire than Jameson’s. Understanding a painting, she argued, ‘requires a wide range of intellectual qualifications; something of the astuteness of the lawyer, the diagnosis of the physician and the research of the antiquary and historian’.⁵⁶ By the 1850s Eastlake had also begun to disavow the moral basis of Jameson’s art criticism, writing, ‘Whether sacred or historical, landscape or domestic, art was not given to man either to teach him religion or morality.’⁵⁷ Nonetheless, her lengthy and stinging critique of John Ruskin’s disparagement of Renaissance artists in the first volume of his Modern Painters (1843) explained his denigration of them on the grounds that he suffered a deficit of sympathy, the quality Jameson had identified as vital to an educated taste in art. How else, she argued, could he fail to recognize the power of Renaissance masterpieces such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden?⁵⁸

Eastlake’s argument that Ruskin lacked the sympathy vital to professional art criticism repeated one of the two principles Jameson had set out as vital to its disinterested practice: sympathy with the art’s moral message, alongside a historically informed understanding of the artist’s choice of subject. ‘Is this the language of a man’, Eastlake asked of Ruskin’s criticism, ‘whose heart and mind have been refined even by the commonest and most legitimate influences of art?’⁵⁹ She might have added that Jameson’s art criticism had also done much to foster the wider appreciation of art on which the success of their professional careers depended.⁶⁰ Between 1843 and 1845 Jameson contributed forty-three articles on Italian art to Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine, supporting Knight’s attempt to provide cheap and easily accessible education that would, in his words, ‘end art’s “long reign of exclusiveness”’ and provide ‘“the bulk of the people … [with a] perception of the beauty of Art”’.⁶¹ ‘The faculty of delight in beauty needs to be educated like all our faculties,’ Jameson wrote a few years later.⁶² And although in his criticism Ruskin limited what Jameson called ‘educated taste’ in art to a narrower circle of connoisseurs, and Eastlake accused him of being an unsympathetic critic, his opening claim in Modern Painters that on viewing a painting ‘the feelings are feebly touched, if they permit us to reason on the methods of their excitement’, repeated the principle Jameson had done so much to promote since the 1820s, that a technical knowledge of a painter’s style was not enough on its own to constitute good taste.⁶³

Ruskin agreed implicitly in Modern Painters with the claim Jameson had made over a decade before him: sympathy was an important means of appreciating the moral truth of beautiful art. But whereas Jameson claimed it was simple to develop this faculty using her guidance, Ruskin adopted a position similar to Hazlitt before him: he limited its acquisition to an elite few, writing that ‘sympathy [is] only to be felt by minds in some degree high and solitary themselves’, meaning ‘the true meaning and end’ of a painter’s art ‘must thus be sealed to thousands, or misunderstood by them’.⁶⁴ And while his distinction between a painting’s technical execution and its power to evoke sympathy echoed the principles of ‘educated taste’ in Jameson’s art criticism, he denigrated the Renaissance art she celebrated. Gothic art was a superior source of moral improvement, in his opinion, given that Renaissance art tended towards selfish personification which both led to and was symptomatic of social decay.⁶⁵ Jameson disagreed firmly in her articles for the Penny Magazine, which were collected into her Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, and of the Progress of Painting in Italy: From Cimabue to Bassano (1845) and which challenged the idea that the cultivation of art and artistic taste in this period jeopardized moral and social progress. On the contrary, her study of the heights of Renaissance painting revealed a lesson for the present. ‘We often hear in these days’, she argued, ‘of “the spirit of the age”; but in that wonderful age three mighty spirits were stirring society to its depth: – the spirit of bold investigation into truths of all kinds which led to the Reformation; the spirit of daring adventure, which led men in search of new worlds beyond the eastern and western oceans; and the spirit of art, through which men soared even to the “seventh heaven of invention.”’⁶⁶ And the following year Jameson developed her challenge to Ruskin’s celebration of J. M. W. Turner’s paintings at the expense of Italian masters in her Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals (1846):

‘But’, says my friend, ‘if you would have Venice, seek it in Turner’s pictures!’ True, I may seek it, but shall I find it? … Canaletti gives us the forms without the colour or light. Turner, the colour and light without the forms … if you would take into your soul the very soul and inward life and spirit of Venice – breathe the same air – go to Titian …⁶⁷

The ‘real value, the real immortality of the beautiful productions of old art’, she reminded her readers, ‘lies in their truth … we carry it with us into a wider, grander horizon’.⁶⁸ This lent further weight to the claims she had made in Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters the year before, which the Athenaeum hailed as an ‘indispensable’ guide to ‘that many-headed ignoramus, the Million’, teaching them the ‘rudiments of connoisseurship’; by 1891 ‘at least six editions of the book had been published’.⁶⁹ And while other art critics such as Hannah Lawrance found affinity with Ruskin’s valorization of Gothic as opposed to Renaissance art, his limit of an educated taste in art to a ‘very limited class of society’ was less appealing to her. On the contrary, argued this eminent historian of medieval England, a taste for beautiful and useful art in the Gothic period was the product of men’s and women’s combined efforts ‘from the noble even to the peasant’, reiterating Jameson’s principle that the more widely a society cultivated her principles of ‘educated taste’, the more quickly it would reap the moral and social benefits.⁷⁰

Jameson applied the principles of her art criticism to Christian iconography in her final art history series, Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), which was mostly composed of a series of articles she wrote for the Athenaeum between January 1845 and February 1846. This was followed by Legends of the Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts (1850), Legends of the Madonna (1852) and The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art (1864), which was a posthumous publication completed by Elizabeth Eastlake. These were further guides designed to educate the nation: she encouraged her readers to collect prints of the works of art she covered in the book ‘and arrange them in the same order’ to lead the mind ‘beyond the mere pleasure of comparison and criticism, to “thoughts more elevate, and reasonings high” of things celestial and terrestrial’. And at the start of Sacred and Legendary Art, she mocked once again the ‘would-be connoisseurship’ of her eighteenth-century predecessors and ‘the very small stock of ideas on which people set up a pretension to taste – the false notions, the mixture of pedantry and ignorance, which every where prevailed’. Instead she directed her readers to her by now familiar claims of the ‘larger principles of criticism as applied to the study of art’, which revealed the moral significance of devotional and historical pictures: ‘a thousand-fold pleasure is theirs’, she wrote, ‘who to a sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in Art, and who combine with delicacy of perception, and technical knowledge, more elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more excursive thought’.⁷¹ She had claimed that Renaissance and baroque art represented ‘the bold spirit of investigation into truth of all kinds which led to the Reformation’, effectively rendering it proto-Protestant to forestall any suspicion of its Catholicism. She performed the same intellectual move in her history of medieval iconography, arguing that it represented the ‘eternal spirit of Christianity’, adapted without difficulty in the present ‘to good and glorious purposes’.⁷²

Jameson also used her art criticism of Christian iconography to claim that powerful historical women were responsible for civilizational progress: inspirational figures who challenged domestic models of femininity. The third series of Sacred and Legendary Art, for example, was devoted to the Madonna, who appeared as one of her ideal heroines, akin to those she had celebrated in her works of literary criticism such as Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831) and Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832). Legends of the Madonna had been foreshadowed by her study of Mary Magdalene in 1848, someone whom Jameson singled out as being ‘recognized and accepted in every Christian heart as the impersonation of the penitent sinner absolved through faith and love’. Contrary to standard accounts of the saint’s life, she portrayed the Magdalene as a loyal apostle; after Jesus’s crucifixion, in Jameson’s telling it was she who successfully ‘preached to the people’ of France, ‘reproaching them for their senseless worship of dumb idols’ before adopting the ascetic life of one of the desert fathers, visited every day by angels from heaven.⁷³ The illustrations Jameson supplied in her criticism showed the Magdalene ‘as a lone figure in public leadership’: her sketch of the portrait by Annibale Caracci shows the saint ‘without the characteristic alabaster box of ointment’; instead she holds ‘a book and a skull as a memento mori, the marks of a philosopher rather than a penitent’.⁷⁴ In this way, Jameson used her art criticism to challenge models of femininity which disadvantaged women in the present and helped to shift general attitudes towards Mary Magdalene. By 1860 the traditionalist fireside magazine Good Words could note that she was ‘a woman, of whose moral character the Scripture says not one disapproving word, [and yet] has been for ages the victim of a most abominable slander’.⁷⁵

On Jameson’s death in 1860, Frederick Denison Maurice spoke for many when he hailed her as a pioneering art critic and historian who used her expertise to popularize an educated taste in art. Jameson not only took advantage of what has been described as ‘the culture of connoisseurship’ in nineteenth-century England to claim the status of a professional art critic and historian, but she also played a decisive role in diversifying the discourse of connoisseurship by propelling a popular discourse of ‘educated taste’ in art that was widely respected.⁷⁶ Her work, wrote Maurice, showed the road ‘out of dilettantism, into that of which it is the counterfeit; out of criticism that crushes all creative power, into the criticism which reverences and fosters it; out of the independence of the sexes which destroyed the work of both, into that fellowship and co-operation which is implied in their existence’.⁷⁷ The sentiments were shared widely and it was not long before Jameson’s friend and fellow woman of letters Susan Horner was able to raise a subscription to commission John Gibson to sculpt a bust of Jameson, which was duly installed at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), before being transferred to the National Portrait Gallery in 1883. In Jameson’s honour, Gibson reduced his usual fee from £150 to £50 for the bust: he had long respected her as his equal on questions of taste in art, writing to her in 1853 that he would ‘always value yr. opinions, for you have given to the world proofs of yr feeling and judgment in art … You and I know what is necessary to be a Judge on art.’⁷⁸ The bust was ready by the end of 1862, and the inscription on the marble pedestal aptly extols ‘a distinguished critic,/and writer upon art./Endowed with poetic genius/and/a vigorous understanding,/… [she] awakened/a clearer comprehension/of truth and beauty/in art/as well as in nature.’⁷⁹

Figure 1.4. John Gibson, Anna Jameson, marble bust, 1862 © National Portrait Gallery, London.