Note 46 to Chapter 8 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.
Eliot praises "the pictures of Teniers" and "the ragged boys of Murillo" for their "truthfulness." The latter are probably the two beggar-boys in the Dulwich College Gallery, whom she admired in 1859 and may have seen earlier (Cross, II, 88). Eliot criticizes the figures in Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd as "not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments." She was thinking of the stylized rococo shepherds and shepherdesses to be found on many Dresden china statuettes. Her instinct about Hunt's source was accurate enough, for the iconography of the central figures in The Hireling Shepherd comes from an erotic pastoral painting by Boucher entitled Pensent-t-ils a ce mouton?; see Macmillan, "Holman Hunt's Hireling Shepherd " But Eliot failed to see the moral criticism of the rococo pastoral tradition involved in Hunt's use of the figures and of monitory emblematic details such as the death's-head moth.
The Hireling Shepherd is actually much closer than Eliot supposed to the Ruskinian version of pastoral advocated in her essay and exemplified in Adam Bede. 47 See Rodee, "Scenes of Rural and Urban Poverty," pp. 4, 37, 91. On English rural genre painting before 1855, see Roberts, "Marriage, Redundancy, or Sin," p. 55.
Last modified 20 September 2000