VICTORIAN TASTE ( A STUDY OF THE ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE FROM 1830 TO 1870 )

First issued in 1950 under the title Consort of Taste, the reappearance of this book is heralded by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as "right and proper. It was a pioneering study when it came out; now, after general evaluation of matters of Victorian art and architecture has changed so rapidly, it can with confidence be called a classic."

The book discusses both strange and familiar aspects of the Early and High Victorian decades, bringing to light such important but little-known figures as: Anna Jameson, G. F. Waagen, Sir Francis Palgrave, William Bell Scott, and Sir Charles and Lady Eastlake. Steegman's major discovery, however, was Elizabeth Eastlake, a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review (from which much of the book's material has been taken) and an astute commentator on events of the day. She figures prominently in the book "because she so well typifies that upper middle-class society, living chiefly on earned incomes, which contrived to keep one foot in the intellectual and the other in the fashionable camp, and which did so much to form Victorian culture."

In an attempt to establish what was considered good or bad by critical and intelligent minds of the day, and why it was so considered, the book covers the influence of the German Nazarene taste on England; the efforts of Prince Albert to promote historical and literary wall painting and "serious moral art" (the Italian primitives, Cranach, Overbeck, Dyce, and Augustus Egg); the Government Schools of Design; collectors and the "new connoisseurship." "Now," concludes Pevsner, "if on all these enterprises and the Arundel Society prints and the [Great Exhibition] of 1851 and so much else John Steegman tells us are as much as need be known and tells it so well and knowledgeably, it must be remembered that the specialists' books which we now have were all written later." Thus the book remains an original, entertaining, and objective account of taste in the Victorian era.