Note 8 to Chapter 2 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Cross, II, 87-88, and Letters, V, 329. At Bethnal Green the Leweses saw the Hertford Gallery of Pictures, the core of what is now the Wallace Collection. The Illustrated London News (29 June 1872, p. 631) called it "unquestionably the most important private collection in the world," and spoke of "more than 600 oil paintings, about 200 water colour drawings and miniatures, and over 1000 objects of art in Sevres and other porcelain, bronzes, decorative furniture, &c." The Leweses were particularly struck by Constant Troyon's Landscape with Cattle (1857?), and they also mentioned works by Hobbema, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Decamps.
Last modified 20 September 2000