Note 46 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.
George Eliot could have seen a number of Moroni's works in London in the 1860s and 1870s. The National Gallery purchased the famous Portrait of a Tailor in 1862, another portrait in 1865, and three more in 1876. Sir A. H. Layard loaned three Moronis to the South Kensington Museum in 1869, two of which had been displayed at the great Leeds Exhibition of 1868, which George Eliot attended (Letters, IV, 476). Eliot also knew the two portraits by Moroni in the Museo Civico at Brescia (see "Italy 1864," Beinecke Library, entry for 4 June).
If she had a specific portrait in mind when describing Grandcourt, I suspect that it was one of Layard's, the Portrait said to represent Count Lupi, which was shown at Leeds and now hangs in the National Gallery (no. 3129); see Cecil Gould, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools (excluding the Venetian): (London: Publications Department of the National Gallery, 1962), p. 118.
Last modified 20 September 2000