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Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake: Photography 1857 + Hill and Adamson: portraits of Elizabeth Rigby
Eastlake c1845.
With her artist and curator husband, Sir Charles Eastlake (translator of Goethe’s Theory of Colour
in 1840, and later director of the National Gallery, London 1843), Elizabeth Eastlake, an amateur
artist, but already a published critic, translator and art historian, played a central role in the British
mid-century cultural scene. Her 1857 essay in the London Quarterly Review,(for which she was the
first female writer) is a brilliantly researched history and analysis of Photography, from the early
experiments of Thomas Wedgwood (1802), and the notes of Humphrey Davy, John Herschel and
others - possibly informed by her friendship with David Octavius Hill (see the portraits by Hill and
Adamson above) - which together amount to the first history of early photography, as well as a
vehicle for airing her views on photography and its relation to Art...
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02012/Elizabeth-ne-Rigby-Lady-Eastlake
Lady Eastlake begins her History of Photography (the very first history): "It is now more than fif- teen years ago that specimens of a new and mysterious art were first exhibited to our wondering gaze. They consisted of a few heads of elderly gentlemen executed in a bistre-like colour upon pa- per. The heads were not above an inch long, they were little more than patches of broad light and shade, they showed no attempt to idealise or soften the harshnesses and accidents of a rather rugged style of physiognomy -- on the contrary, the eyes were decidedly contracted, the mouths expanded, and the lines and wrinkles intensified. Nevertheless we examined them with the keenest admiration, and felt that the spirit of Rembrandt had revived. Before that time little was the exist- ence of a power, availing itself of the eye of the sun both to discern and to execute, suspected by the world -- still less that it had long lain the unclaimed and unnamed legacy of our own Sir Humphry Davy. Since then photography has become a household word and a household want; is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; is found in the most sumptuous sa- loon, and in the dingiest attic -- in the solitude of the Highland cottage, and in the glare of the Lon- don gin-palace in the pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and patterns of the mill-owner and manufacturer, and on the cold brave breast on the battle-field.”
Thus Rigby scopes the impact of her subject, hinting at the ubiquity to come, as all the potential applications of photography described by Talbot in his Pencil of Nature are introduced into every aspect of our culture, and yet are intensely personal too. Photography impacted upon everyone: ‘it has become a household word and a household want.’ Elizabeth Rigby, also speculated on the im- pact of photography on fine art. It’s well worth quoting here from her original text: