Note 3 to Chapter 9 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.
On Rembrandt, see Cross, II, 49, 190; Letters, V, 89; "Art and Belles Lettres," Westminster Review, 65 (1856), 628-29, and "Impressions of Theophrastus Such" (13: 197). Rembrandt's squalling, pissing Ganymede at Dresden offended George Eliot (Cross, ll, 49) and inspired the following passage in Adam Bede: "What little child ever refused to be comforted by that glorious sense of being seized strongly and swung upward? I don't believe Ganymede cried when the eagle carried him away, and perhaps deposited him on Jove's shoulder at the end" (30: 52).
Last modified 20 September 2000