Geore Eliot''s Madame Laure in Middlemarch

Introduction

"George Eliot's mind is like the National Gallery; for every canvas on display there are two stored away in the basement" (p. 37). W. J. Harvey's simile for the contents of George Eliot's mind in general aptly summarizes her knowledge of painting in particular. She had a wide acquaintance with pictures and artists. From the time she received her first illustrated book and painted her first water colors of floral arrangements, she had an abiding interest in the visual arts. The record of that interest is unusually full, thanks to the many surviving letters and journals which describe her experience of painting and sculpture. Only in the cases of Thackeray and Henry James are we as well informed about the pictorial knowledge and tastes of a major Victorian novelist.

Discussion

There are gaps in the record, of course. We can never know the names of all the pictures, statues, and exhibitions that Eliot saw. To begin with, the record of the early years in London was partially destroyed by J. W. Cross, who removed from George Eliot's journal forty-six pages covering the years 1849-54 (Haight, p. 71). Cross's folly sadly restricts our view of an especially formative period in Eliot's life. Furthermore, although her travel journals for the period 1854-65 have survived, the journals for subsequent trips, such as the visit to the Prado during a tour of Madrid in 1867, are sketchy or missing altogether. Then, too, Eliot did not regularly record her reactions to the paintings she saw at home in London. For our knowledge of her London experience, we must depend upon chance [9/10] references in her letters. Finally, she had no cause to note down all the prints, engravings, and book illustrations that enriched her daily life.(Benson,434)

Yet despite these omissions a substantial amount of information remains. We can reconstruct in surprising detail the novelist's attendance of galleries and exhibitions in London, her visits to museums on the Continent, her personal contacts with painters, and her reading in the literature of art.

In his account of George Eliot's last years, Cross reports that "she was in the habit of going with me very frequently to the National Gallery, and to other exhibitions of pictures, to the British Museum sculptures, and to South Kensington" (Cross, III, 343). This habit was of long standing; in fact, George Eliot had frequented the museums, galleries, and exhibitions of London from the time she first settled there in 1851 (Haight, p. 103). Each spring she liked to attend the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the Society of Painters in Water-Colours.5 She also enjoyed the annual Exhibition of Pictures by Modern Artists of the French School, instituted in 1854 by Ernest Gambart at the French Gallery.(Lewes,335)



George Eliot's knowledge of "the galleries of Europe"

In Daniel Deronda George Eliot's narrator speaks with authority of "the galleries of Europe" (38:298). The novelist knew them well from a series of holidays and working visits to the Continent between 1854 and ...