Julia Cartwright Ady

Artist Info

Julia Cartwright AdyNorthamptonshire, 1851 - 1924, Oxford

LC name authority rec. n 50037588

LC Heading: Cartwright, Julia, 1851-1924

Oxford dictionary of national biography online, 6 November 2014: b (Julia Mary Cartwright, married name Ady; art historian and biographer; born in Edgcote, Northamptonshire, on 7 November 1851; died 28 April 1924 in Oxford)

Cartwright [married name Ady], Julia Mary (1851–1924), art historian and biographer, was born at the family home, Edgcote House, Edgcote, Northamptonshire, on 7 November 1851, one of the ten children of Richard Aubrey Cartwright and his wife, Mary Fremantle (d. 1885). She was educated privately at home; the Cartwright family were highly cultured and learned languages, music, and dancing as well as attending concerts and lectures in London, Oxford, and Leamington Spa. Julia had nine siblings but was closest to her younger brother Chauncy, who later joined the Foreign Office and helped her career through his diplomatic contacts. Her uncle William Cornwallis Cartwright was an art collector and a fervent supporter of the Italian Risorgimento: both his passions influenced his niece, who had the run of his library and gallery at Aynhoe. In 1868 the family toured France, Austria, and Italy: Julia kept a journal of the voyage. Soon after, she ‘came out’, by which time her literary ambitions were alarming her parents.

In 1871 Julia Cartwright published a piece in Aunt Judy's Magazine; shortly afterwards she became a regular contributor to C. M. Yonge's Monthly Packet, another publication for young people, to which she was invited to contribute a series, ‘The lives of the saints’. To the concern of her mother, who felt that literary pursuits distracted her from looking for a husband, Julia Cartwright became increasingly interested in Renaissance Italy and its culture, reading the works of Anna Jameson, John Ruskin, Charles Eastlake, Walter Pater, J. A. Crowe, and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, as well as the poetry of Robert Browning. In 1873 she submitted an article on Giotto to Macmillan's Magazine: it was her first fully referenced and researched piece of work. It was rejected, but eventually appeared in the New Quarterly in 1877. She retained an interest in many other fields, including contemporary art: an early fondness for Maclise, Turner, and Landseer gave way to an appreciation of Whistler.

In the 1870s Julia Cartwright also wrote novels for the SPCK—the first of which was Madelaine (1872)—and visited Italy three times, becoming increasingly interested in matters of patronage and the life of the religious reformer Savonarola. In 1877 she sent a review of Margaret Oliphant's Makers of Florence (1876) to The Academy, an arts journal edited by Charles Appleton, who became a supportive critic of her work. In the late 1870s and early 1880s she became involved in artistic and literary circles in London; she met Oscar Browning and the architect T. P. Jackson and became a good friend of Lady Knightley, with whom she visited the British Museum print room to view drawings by Botticelli. She visited the studios of leading artists such as Watts and Burne-Jones, and attended exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery.

Despite her growing commitments, by the late 1870s Julia Cartwright was becoming lonely, as many of her female friends married. In 1878, however, (William) Henry Ady (d. 1915), the son of William Ady, the rector of Little Baddow in Essex, became rector of Edgcote: he had high-church sympathies, like Julia herself, and had been a friend of her beloved uncle Stephen Fremantle (d. 1874). Julia married him on 24 August 1880 at Edgcote, and he proved to be a supportive husband who encouraged her to continue her work. Their only daughter, Cecilia Mary Ady, was born in November 1881. Julia successfully funded her daughter's education through her literary earnings and Cecilia later became a tutor in Renaissance history at St Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1881 Julia Ady published her first art book, Mantegna and Francia; it was the first of a series of publications on Mantegna in the later nineteenth century. She was becoming a significant figure in the expanding world of art criticism, writing for journals such as Portfolio, the Magazine of Art, and (later) the Art Journal. In 1882 her earnings from her publications totalled £139.

In the 1880s and 1890s Julia Ady combined her duties as a vicar's wife (first at Edgcote and later at Charing, Kent) with visits to London and her writing career, producing a wide range of articles on the Renaissance art world. She also became increasingly interested in modern art, particularly the work of landscapists and aesthetic and symbolist painters. She was impressed with the work of Rossetti, Burne-Jones (the subject of a full-length monograph in 1894), and Watts (on whose work she published a monograph in 1896). She was also interested in the work of the Italian landscapist Giovanni Costa (on whom she wrote an article for the Magazine of Art), and French artists including Millet, Bastien-Lepage, and Puvis de Chavannes (on all of whom she eventually wrote in the 1890s).

During the 1880s and 1890s Julia Ady read most of the major new works of art criticism, ranging from Pater's impressionistic essays on the Renaissance to the more scholarly publications of Giovanni Morelli. She became firm friends with Vernon Lee, an expert on eighteenth-century Italian culture, and in 1894 she met the critic Bernard Berenson. Both became friendly critics of her work as she developed from an amateur writer into a professional art historian. The impact of new art-critical methods was apparent in three works published on Raphael in 1905. Similarly, her monograph on Sandro Botticelli (1903; rev. edn, 1904) showed a full awareness of both Berenson's and Herbert Horne's work on this artist.

In 1893 Julia Cartwright published Sacharissa, a biography of Dorothy Sidney, Edmund Waller's muse; it was followed in 1894 by Madame, a biography of Charles II's sister Henriette, duchess of Orléans. Both were based on extensive archival research, and represented an important new direction in her work: biographies of women who had played a role in the cultural politics of their age. In 1899 she published Beatrice D'Este, an appetizer for her comprehensive biography Isabella D'Este (1903), on the Renaissance art patron. This was an extensively researched work, for which she had been preparing for some fifteen years. While presenting a sanitized portrait of Isabella as an ideal Victorian domestic heroine, it also revealed her extensive cultural activities and (more tangentially) her significant role in Renaissance politics. Unfortunately, Isabella led to a publishing controversy: two Italian scholars, Alessandro Luzio and Rodolpho Renier, who had long been working on the life of the marchioness and had published groups of her letters upon which Julia Cartwright had drawn (with acknowledgement) charged her with a copyright violation. A settlement was reached, but not without considerable distress to Cartwright.

Working on the Este sisters provided Julia Cartwright with much of the material for her next publication, a biography of Baldassare Castiglione, published in 1908. Extensively researched (she spent long hours in the British Museum and visited Italian libraries in 1904 and 1906), it remains the best biography in English of The Courtier's author, despite her idealization of the poet-courtier: Cartwright was determined to redress the British perception of the Italian Renaissance as an age of treachery, Machiavellian politics, and debauchery.

Castiglione was Cartwright's last major work. In 1914 she published The Italian Gardens of the Renaissance and other Studies, a compilation of articles which had been previously published in Nineteenth Century. She also edited the journals of Lady Knightley (1915) and wrote a biography of Christina of Denmark (1913), the subject of a full-length portrait by Holbein. It was not a success: hagiographical biographies were losing their appeal even before Lytton Strachey's reinvention of the genre. She travelled with her daughter (who, to her horror, declared her intention of remaining single) and met Cecilia's Oxford friends, including the art historian Joan Evans. This exposure to independently minded women of learning—as well as her admiration for Renaissance women such as Isabella—may well have influenced her changing view on women's suffrage, as she now became a cautious supporter of votes for women.

In 1915, when her husband died, Julia Cartwright moved to Oxford to be closer to her daughter. During the First World War she became involved in the foundation of the Italian League, which was intended to further Anglo-Italian understanding. Her ability to appreciate modern art was by now declining: she had been horrified by the post-impressionist exhibition of 1912. In 1919 she ceased to keep a diary, and little is known of her last years. She died at her Oxford home, 40 St Margaret's Road, on 28 April 1924. Her daughter, Cecilia, was the sole beneficiary of her will.

Julia Cartwright's career reflects the transition of the historical disciplines from the amateur and antiquarian enthusiasms of the nineteenth century to the more academic and professional approaches of the early twentieth century. As a historian of women she helped to rediscover figures such as Isabella D'Este, who had played significant roles as the inspiration, patrons, and mediators of cultural production. As a cultural historian she contributed to developing modern Renaissance studies through her research into the works, lives, and interactions of leading figures. As John Hale memorably put it, ‘she stands for that pre-academic relish for Renaissance Italy which placed, as it were, an archival filling within the truffles of near-adoration’ (Bright Remembrance, x). But although she was essentially a late Victorian in her perspective on culture and cultural history, she responded to new art-critical methods and new research in her field, a field in which her own professionally trained daughter was to succeed her.

Rosemary Mitchell

Sources

A. Emanuel, ‘Julia Cartwright 1851–1924: art critic and historian of Renaissance Italy’, PhD diss., UCL, 1985 · A bright remembrance: the diaries of Julia Cartwright, ed. A. Emanuel (1989) · H. Fraser, ‘Victorian women on Renaissance women’, unpublished article, 2000 · R. A. Mitchell, ‘“Absolutely without knowledge and instinct of painting”: women art historians and the gendering of Victorian art historians’, unpublished paper, 2000–01 · will · WWW · b. cert. · d. cert.