Losano: The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

Antonia Losano

The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists.

Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios—a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical—by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.

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Altick: Paintings from Books

Paintings from Books

Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900

Richard D. Altick

Breaking new ground in the study of British painting and literature, Richard D. Altick reveals in this informative and richly illustrated volume how the literary taste of the day was reflected, sometimes controversially, on the walls of London’s annual art exhibitions. Armed with catalogues that were miniature anthologies of poetic extracts, gallery-goers looked at prominent artists’ versions of their favorite characters and scenes in poetry, fiction, and the drama, and judged them according to the preconceptions already formed in their mind’s eye. Beginning in Hogarth’s time and the first years of the Royal Academy and lasting down to the end of Victoria’s reign, paintings with subjects from English literature—some twelve thousand are recorded—reaffirmed in a new context the ancient belief in the sisterhood of the arts.

In the early years, when the lofty goal of history painting in the grand style beckoned ambitious artists, they drew their subjects mainly from Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. Later, as the affluent middle-class market for household art grew, and with it the demand for congenial literary subjects, Burns, Scott, Byron, and Tennyson joined the company of most-painted authors. From the Lady of Shalott and the nude Musidora in Thomson’s The Seasons to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost and domestic genre scenes from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, British art served for more than a century and a half as a comprehensive mirror of the currents and eddies of literary taste.

The developments traced in this book, which is based on an exhaustive study of the graphic and printed annals of British art and the records of individual authors’ fame, makes it clear that we can say of literary pictures what Henry James once said of English art in particular: “English painting interests me chiefly, not as painting, but as English. It throws little light, on the whole, on the art of Titian and Rembrandt; but it throws a light which is to me always fresh, always abundant, always fortunate, on the turn of the English mind.”

Following the dozen chapters that constitute the narrative portion of the book, Parts Two and Three comprise a convenient guide to the art histories of each of Shakespeare’s plays and the works of some thirty other authors. A finding-list of reproductions of literary paintings and a large bibliography enhance the book’s value to readers interested in learning more about this hitherto neglected subject.

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Hancher: The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books

The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books

Michael Hancher

“The Times, the chief newspaper of Victorian England, first reported the existence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland toward the end of an unsigned omnibus review that appeared the day after Christmas 1865. . . . For the Times reviewer, as for other contemporary readers of Alice’s Adventures, it was not Carroll’s text but the set of illustrations by John Tenniel that made the book worth noticing. Three days earlier the Pall Mall Gazette had praised the story as well as the illustrations, but it emphasized the illustrator’s name, not the author’s. Later the children’s journal Aunt Judy’s Magazine would begin its review of the book with a concise and telling statement of priorities: ‘Forty-two illustrations by Tenniel! Why there needs nothing else to sell this book, one would think.’

“In the [20th] century, Carroll’s fame as the author of the two Alice books has eclipsed that of his artist-collaborator. For a mix of reasons, Lewis Carroll, like Alice herself, has become a creature of popular legend. And yet Tenniel’s own contribution to the books is probably as well known as Carroll’s—perhaps more widely known, for there must be thousands of persons (children and adults alike) who are familiar with reproductions of some of the drawings, despite never having actually read the text.

“Despite, or perhaps because of, the paucity of scholarship on Tenniel, over the decades much legendary tradition has accumulated around several illustrations, and I have tried to give it a thorough and critical hearing.

“I think of this as a first book on the subject, not the last.” —from the introduction

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Cohen: Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators

Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators

Jane R. Cohen

Even casual readers of Charles Dickens have always recognized Mr. Pickwick, Fagin, and Scrooge when they see them in pictures, though they may not know the names of the artists who first portrayed them. For better or worse, consciously or unconsciously, our conception of Dickens’s work seems ineluctably tied to the representations of his characters and scenes by the eighteen draftsmen with whom he variously and closely worked.

In undertaking to treat systematically comprehensively for the first time in this century Dickens’s personal and professional relations with the first illustrators of his books, Dr. Cohen proceeds on the basis of her conviction that knowledge of these artists and their special contributions is essential to a rounded understanding of the novelist’s life and works and argues that the indivisible blend of historical, psychological, aesthetic, and technical facts that shaped representative illustrations serves best to elucidate them.

As Dr. Cohen demonstrates, Dickens himself left abundant testimony to his intense involvement in most of the nearly nine hundred original illustrations to his books, and the drawings were a part of the initial publication of nearly all of his major works from Sketches by Boz of 1836 to The Mystery of Edwin Drood of 1870. He had close personal as well as professional relationships with many of the eighteen artists who worked with him. He was highly susceptible to being disappointed in the illustrations to his books, but even when his reputation had become secure, his sales steady, and his audience sufficiently literate to permit him to publish his texts unadorned (as some critics urged him to do), he usually retained the pictorial format—clearly convinced, despite the difficulties of coordinating pictures and text, of the advantages to himself, to his publishers, to a lesser extent to his illustrators, and above all to his readers. Dickens had, in fact, revolutionized the publication of new fiction between 1836 and 1870 when he issued The Pickwick Papers in illustrated serial form—an enormously successful commercial venture that caused other authors and publishers to rush to emulate it.

But though Dickens’s abiding preoccupation with illustrations was to some extent motivated by economic considerations, they apparently served the far more important function of providing a necessary outlet for the rich overflow of his remarkably visual imagination. He once explained the process by which his fiction was created: “I don’t invent it—really do not—but see it and write it down.” And his instructions to his artists do indeed confirm that he visualized very thoroughly and in a multiplicity and wealth of detail the scenes that he wished to see depicted.

It was, in fact, as much the force of Dickens’s personality and pictorial imagination that assured the success of his illustrations as it was the talent of the artists he employed. He managed quickly to reverse the traditional roles that subordinated author to artist, and though the less complacent and more famous among them must have resisted this, the illustrators of Dickens fared better than most of the colleagues at a time when they were to painters as novelists were to poets—the less prestigious, though usually more popular, practitioners of their craft. If George Cruikshank and Robert Seymour assisted Dickens in his rise to fame, they, in turn, have been assured of immortality by virtue of their work for him. Hablot Browne’s stature as an artist rested almost exclusively on his illustrations for Dickens. John Leech’s name on the title pages of the Christmas books consolidated his reputation as a talented satirist, and John Tenniel’s byline led to his work for Punch and his collaboration with Lewis Carroll. Some of the artists were already respected painters when they went to work for Dickens; others became so as a result of the association. Many, like Edwin Landseer and Samuel Palmer, have earned a place in art history not dependent on their Dickens illustrations, but with few exceptions, until the recent revival of interest in Victoriana, most were better remembered for their illustrations of Dickens than for their ambitious canvases. At a time when scholars have begun to recognize that the major achievement in the graphic arts of the Victorian era may have been in the field of book illustration, those who labored to illustrate Dickens are deserving of renewed attention. Certainly, his modern readers owe it to Dickens to accord to his artists some measure of the serious consideration he lavished on their efforts to embellish in pictures the pages that he wrote.

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