George Eliot's Piero and Ruskin's Artist

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 31 to Chapter 5 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.

See Lawrence Poston III, "Setting and Theme in Romola," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20 (1965), 358-59. As a choral observer rather than a participant, Piero fulfills a dictum of Ruskin's that George Eliot copied into her commonplace book around the time she was creating Romola: "Of course, a painter of men must be among men; but it ought to be as a watcher, not as a companion." See George Eliot's commonplace book, Beinecke Library, p. 99, and Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. III, chap. ii, para. 13n, in Works, XI, 53.

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Last modified 28 November 2004