Note 14 to Chapter 3 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.
In the opening chapters of the third volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin attacks Sir Joshua Reynolds's notion of the grand style in painting and refutes Reynolds's criticism of the Dutch school. These chapters, which George Eliot reviewed in 1856, are the most important source of the ideas propounded in chapter 17 of Adam Bede; see Darrell Mansell, Jr., "Ruskin and George Eliot's 'Realism,"' Criticism, 7 (1965), 203-16. Mansell points out that Eliot even borrows Ruskin's famous example of the real griffin from chapter 8 of Modern Painters III. Clearly Eliot had Ruskin's rebuttal of Reynolds in mind when she wrote to William Blackwood on 4 February 1857, defending Scenes of Clerical Life against some reported objections: "much adverse opinion will of course arise from a dislike to the order of art rather than from a critical estimate of the execution. Any one who detests the Dutch school in general will hardly appreciate fairly the merits of a particular Dutch painting" (Letters, II, 292).
Last modified 20 September 2000