| This dissertation examines the development of professional art criticism in a period when art education became a national concern in Britain. It aims both to illuminate the importance of art criticism to Victorian visual and literary culture and to recover critics---including Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee---who have been neglected in recent studies of the subject. The first chapter studies the effects of the 1835--6 Select Committee on the State of Arts and Manufactures on such Victorian cultural and institutional formations as art criticism itself, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, and Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novel North and South (1854--5). While the committee and Victorian art critical discourse betrayed considerable anxiety about class mobility, Gaskell and some women critics complicate the relationship between class and taste, suggesting that proper aesthetic perception can overcome class differences. The second chapter treats the professionalization of the art critic, a development more commonly associated with doctors and lawyers. While this process appeared to exclude women, in fact, female art critics shaped the profession in remarkable ways, often combining art historical and literary approaches with distinctly feminist interpretations of art. Chapter three assays the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the debate over the National Gallery, and representations of art galleries in two novels, Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874). Bronte and Eliot engage Ruskinian realism and the emphasis on proper attribution---strikingly, while each depicting artworks called "Cleopatra"---but in ways that invite readers to dissent from the opinions of restrictive guides. The fourth chapter examines the reception of both literary and visual impressionism in Britain through such prominent controversies as those surrounding Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and the Whistler v. Ruskin trial (1878). While worrying that some impressionist art was---because of its supposedly hasty creation and emphasis on subjective feelings---overly commercial and popular, art critics found in other works models of difficulty that justified the need for their expertise. |
