Emilia Dilke

Emilia Dilke , before her marriage also Francis Pattison, (born September 2, 1840 in Ilfracombe , Devon, † October 23, 1904 , maiden name: Emily Francis Strong) was a British feminist, art historian and trade unionist.

Lady Dilke, painting by Hubert von Herkomer 1887

Life

She also published as EFS Pattison or Mrs. Mark Pattison. Until the age of 45 she used the gender bivalent first name Francis, later Emilia.

She was the daughter of the bank manager and amateur painter Henry Strong, a friend of the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais , and grew up near Oxford , was raised by a governess and attended the South Kensington Art School in London from the age of 18. There she met her future husband Charles Dilke , Edward Burne-Jones and George Eliot . In 1861 she married Mark Pattison , 27 years her senior , who was the rector of Lincoln College at Oxford University. He introduced her to the works of the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte and Jacob Burckhardt , which later had an influence on her art reviews, which were less subjectively colored than other critics of the time such as John Ruskin , and she met Walter Pater in Oxford . From the 1870s she campaigned for women's rights and with William Morris and John Ruskin for women's education. From 1875 she made contact with Charles Dilke, her future husband, and probably became his lover. She was dissatisfied with her marriage, which was almost platonic on the part of her husband, and expressed this in short stories that were only slightly disguised in the form of Arthurian legends. She threw herself on studying art history but suffered a breakdown and was addicted to morphine for a time. After her husband's death in 1884, she married Charles Dilke in 1885 and was then known as Lady Dilke. Both marriages were a topic of conversation in their day, especially after the scandalous trial of her second husband Charles Dilke in 1886, which ended his hopeful political career in the Liberal Party .

Together with Anna Jameson, she was one of the first female art critics and art historians in Great Britain and wrote for the Saturday Review from 1864 and was an art critic for The Academy magazine from 1870 , and as an art editor from 1873. She also wrote for numerous other English and French magazines (such as The Portfolio ). She reported on the Paris salons and was particularly impressed by Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet . In France, she made friends with the librarian of the École des Beaux-Arts Eugène Müntz after contacting him about a planned but unrealized book about the French engraver Étienne Delaune (1518–1595). In addition to works on art history, she published short stories.

Her specialty was later French arts and crafts of the 18th century, about which she published a series of books from 1899. As an art historian, she endeavored to treat sculpture and handicrafts equally as well as painting and graphics. In 1897 she was invited to write the preface to the Wallace Collection catalog . In 1904 she was involved in organizing a large exhibition of French art in London. She also wrote (in French) a biography of Claude Lorrain , about which she found new documents, and on the patronage of painting in 17th century France (Art in the Modern State).

She also wrote about French politics and women's rights, and in 1874 she was president of the Woman's Trade Union League (WTUL). She worked closely with her niece Gertrude Tuckwell (1861-1951), the daughter of William Tuckwell .

Her extensive art library went to the South Kensington Museum ( British Museum ), her personal notes went to the Paris École des Beaux-Arts.

Fonts

Under the name Pattison:

• The Renaissance of Art in France , 2 volumes, London, C. Kegan Paul 1879.
• "Sir Frederic Leighton , PRA" In Illustrated Biographies of Modern Artists , publisher Francois G. Dumas, Paris, 1882
• Claude Lorrain , sa vie and ses oeuvres , Paris: J. Rouam, 1884

Under the name Dilke:

• Art in the Modern State , London, 1888
• French Painters of the Eighteenth Century , London: G. Bell, 1899
• French Architects and Sculptors of the Eighteenth Century , London: G. Bell, 1900
• French Engravers and Draftsmen of the XVIIIth Century , London: G. Bell, 1902
• French Furniture and Decoration in the Eighteenth Century , London: G. Bell 1901
• The Shrine of Death and Other Stories , London, 1886
• The Shrine of Love and Other Stories , London, 1891
• The Book of the Spiritual Life, with a memoir of the author , 1905 (short stories, essays, with a biography of her husband Charles Dilke)

literature

• Betty Askwith: Lady Dilke: A Biography , London: Chatto and Windus, 1968
• Kali Israel: Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture , New York: OUP, 1999
• Hilary Fraser, "Emilia Dilke," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004
• Elizabeth Mansfield: Articulating Authority: Emilia Dilke's Early Essays and Reviews , Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 31, 1998, pp. 76-86
• Colin Eisler Lady Dilke (1840-1904): The Six Lives of an Art Historian. in: Claire Richter Sherman, Adel M. Holcomb Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979 , Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 147-180

Web links

• Dictionary of Art Historians
• Some of her painter biographies for the Encyclopedia Britannica, wikisource