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  • Bibliography of the New Art Criticism of Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1890–95)
  • Kimberly Morse Jones (bio)

Better known as the co-biographer of the celebrated artist James McNeill Whistler and the wife of the talented American illustrator Joseph Pennell, Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855–1936) has traditionally been viewed as an appendage to high profile men in the Victorian art world, diminishing her independent contributions to art, mainly her art criticism.1 Pennell's other notable literary contributions, including those pertaining to travel, cookery and cycling, have eclipsed her critical writings on art, thus further obscuring her criticism. One reason for this is that, unlike her other writings, Pennell used a variety of pseudonyms, all of which resist identification, such as "N.N." (No Name), "A.U." (Author Unknown) and "P.E.R." (her initials jumbled up). While myriad other reasons account for the fact that Pennell's criticism has been overlooked, the objective of this article is not to account for this negligence, but rather to shed light on a forgotten, yet noteworthy, aspect of her work.

Pennell's criticism constitutes a vital component of a wider movement in Victorian criticism that came to be known as the New Art Criticism, the groundwork of which was laid at the end of the 1880s, culminating in the first half of the 1890s. The New Art Criticism is a loose term referring to a body of critical work championing the new painting, as manifest in the art of the French Impressionists, chiefly Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which struggled to gain currency in Britain during this time. The "New Critics," who also included Alfred Lys Baldry, D.S. MacColl, George Moore, R.A.M. Stevenson, Charles Whibley and Frederick Wedmore, were a seemingly disparate group of individuals who happened to be in "one accord" saying the "same thing," according to John Alfred Spender, assistant-editor and art critic of the Westminster Gazette, the first to identify this burgeoning faction in the art press.2 [End Page 270] More than an innocuous apercu, Spender's statement was a derisive retort to an assertion set forth by D.S. MacColl in the Spectator that Edgar Degas's Dans un Café, also know as L'Absinthe, (1875–6) displayed at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893, "sets a standard in art."3 MacColl and Spender's altercation set into motion a heated debate between various artists and art critics that played itself out in the press over the course of the next several weeks, wherein the line was drawn between two distinct camps.

Simply put, MacColl, in addition to his fellow New Art Critics, believed that Degas's painting, although apparently depicting a prostitute, was beautiful, and that this beauty stemmed from the artist's treatment of the subject, as opposed to the subject itself. As a result of the belief in the primacy of technique, the New Art Critics employed a formalist methodology, wherein form, rather than content, prevails. The Victorian public, conditioned to read works of art in a narrative or didactic manner, was simply unaccustomed to such newfangled ideas, and hence the "Philistines," spearheaded initially by Spender, followed by the artist William Blake Richmond, surfaced in protest.

Pennell did not engage in the L'Absinthe debate directly, but she clearly revealed her allegiance to the New Art Criticism when she described the painting as "grim in its realism," yet "incomparable in its art."4 Although feigning to view the controversy through the lens of the objective onlooker in her article for the Nation, Pennell's bias looms large:

It is true that an occasional Degas . . . has been seen in other London shows; but never hitherto have such a number of the men who have revolutionized art on the Continent been gathered together in a large and fashionable gallery. The bewilderment of the older generation of critics on press day, the hopeless inadequacy of the majority of criticisms published in the big London dailies the next morning, were proofs, if proofs were needed, of the startling revelation their methods seem to the average Englishman. Now that the much-hated, much-dreaded French art - for in England all Continental work belongs under this...

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