THE ELUSIVE AESTHETICS OF VERNON LEE

In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at the center of a robust intellectual community of expatriates living in Europe. Among them were American art critic Bernard Berenson, Lee's lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and the lesbian aunt/niece duo Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who together published poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field. Several scholars have addressed this coterie in terms of its sexual history, but few have linked Lee, Berenson, and Field's shared passion for the art gallery with their interest in aestheticism and its privileging of sensual experience. This paper traces within their work of this period conceptions of connoisseurship, aesthetic value, and spectatorial pleasure: concerns they inherited both from the criticism of Walter Pater and from wider nineteenth-century understandings of the physiological basis of aesthetic feeling. Without eliding their disagreements, I argue that Field, Berenson, and Lee look to the gallery as a model for the modes of selection and curation that they deploy in their own writings about art—especially Field's collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892), Berenson's survey The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), Lee's Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), and “Beauty and Ugliness,” co-authored by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in 1897. To varying degrees, these works assume that encounters with beautiful objects stimulate various “vital” processes in the spectating body, making art an important component of “the collection of things outside us” that Lee thought shaped subjectivity. To Lee and her circle, I suggest, galleries and their literary analogues represent powerful apparatuses for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities and the dissemination of “culture.” In this context, their critical works—which seek to induct adept readers into the pleasures of looking at art correctly—gesture toward an ethical connoisseurship that finds its most enthusiastic expression in Lee's work.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson), 2019

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2014

2011

This book is the result of the enormous generosity and support of several institutions and innumerable friends. initial research was begun on a fellowship at the Clark Art institute, where conversations with Tamar Garb, elizabeth hutchinson, michael Ann holly, mark ledbury, and the rest of the fellows and staff helped me bring the project into focus and start to wrestle with ways to deal with painting and literature in a single study. A subsequent residency at the national humanities Center as a Florence Gould Foundation Fellow allowed me to write the bulk of the text in the most glorious and supportive setting i could ever imagine. i extend my heartfelt gratitude and affection to the nhC administration and staff for their tireless help and constant good cheer:

Art History, 2008

This article examines Vernon Lee’s personal impressions of the people, landscapes, architecture, and religious art she encountered while travelling in Tangier and Southern Spain in the winter of 1888 and 1889 as recorded in her Commonplace Book iv. In doing so, it contextualizes the composition of Lee’s only supernatural tale set in Spain, ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, written in the summer of 1889, and in the wake of a painful period for Lee — intimacy with her companion of eight years, A. Mary F. Robinson, abruptly ended between 1887 and 1888 after Robinson’s unexpected marriage. With an eye to biographical context, this article also marks a return to Lee’s aesthetic theories of the 1880s, usually overshadowed by critical interest in her later theory of ‘aesthetic empathy’ informed by her study of psychological aesthetics. By tracing Lee’s views of the mind in the 1880s as inherently rooted in sympathetic impulses of association — what Lee terms the ‘faculty of association’ — this piece explicates her early aesthetic theories of the ‘aesthetic life’ and ‘historic emotion’, and demonstrates how she used her period of exposure to foreign, and at times unsettling climes and cultures, to experiment with the benefits and limitations of (aesthetic) sympathy in encounters with difference.