Lady Elizabeth Eastlake letters

Group of fourteen letters and two letter fragments mostly from Lady Eastlake concerning social news and art historical matters. Correspondents include: Sir Austen Layard, William Etty, Lady Pollock, Lady Bovill, Miss Ashton, Miss E. Tennant, Lady Strangford, Miss Sinclair, Mdme Allyne, Cosmo Monkhouse and Mr Lane.

Only the letter to Cosmo Monkhouse [NGA59/12] is published in The Letters of Elizabeth Eastlake, ed. Julie Sheldon (Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2009).

Elizabeth Eastlake (née Rigby; 1809-1893) was born in Norwich and spent part of her youth in Germany and Estonia. She developed an early talent for drawing, influenced by artists such as John Sell Cotman, but is primarily remembered as a writer and critic. Her first major work was a 1836 translation of J. D. Passavant's Tour of a German Artist in England. In 1841, she gained attention with her epistolary account Residence on the Shores of the Baltic and began contributing regularly to the Quarterly Review. In 1849 she married the painter and arts administrator, Charles Lock Eastlake, and following his appointment as the first director of the National Gallery in 1855, accompanied him to the Continent each summer to study old masters and inspect pictures on sale in private collections and churches. She wrote extensively about art, and translated German works on Italian art and art collections, including Franz Kugler's Handbook of Italian Art (1851) and Gustav Waagen's four-volume Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1853-1857). After her husband's death in 1865, she sold his book collection to the National Gallery and promoted his legacy by editing Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts by Sir C. L. Eastlake: with a Memoir (1870)'; in 1875 she confided to a cousin that she thought that she would have been his 'best successor in the direction of the Nat: Gallery'. She remained active in the art world, producing notable works on connoisseurship, including Five Great Painters (1883). Lady Eastlake's two-volume Journals and Correspondence were edited for publication by her nephew Charles Eastlake Smith in 1895.

The letters were acquired from various booksellers and autograph dealers by Professor Julie Sheldon, who presented them to the Gallery in Aug 2024.

National Gallery Archive, Lady Eastlake's letters are scattered thoroughout the early Gallery records but there are particular concentrations in the Boxall Papers (NGA1) and Ralph Nicholson Wornum Papers (NGA2) National Gallery Contextual Collection, Lady Eastlake album