Then only arrives in England in 1881 and this is her first visit to England as an adult.
She's been here as a child but obviously in 1881 she's a young woman, she's not even
25 years old and she comes to stay with the Robinsons, so this is Mabel and Mary Robinson,
two prominent young ladies in aesthetic circles who run a salon in their house in Gower Street
and this is where Lee gets to meet the people that she has been reading or reading about
before coming to England, people like William Michael Rosetti, like Oscar Wilde who makes
a strong impression on her, like Leslie Stevens, Virginia Woolf's father.
It is with the Robinsons sisters that she comes to Oxford in July of that year and the
Oxford visit is important because as you know Lee's brother Eugene Lee Hamilton had been
a student here a few years earlier and so Lee wants to see the places where her brother
has been.
But also this year in Oxford that she meets Walter Pater, Walter Pater was an incredibly
influential art critic in the 1870s in England, in 1873 he had published studies in the history
of the Renaissance which is a book about Renaissance art in Italy and France.
The book had had an enormous impact on the English reading public and people had denounced
the book as being immoral, as promoting a doctrine of art that went against social, let's
call them healthy social values of Victorian England, but the book had created around itself
a milieu of people who were interested in aestheticism and art for our sake.
So when Lee meets Pater for the first time, obviously she's very interested in him as
a prominent art critic, as somebody who's doing something completely new in terms of
art criticism.
Art criticism at the time was dominated by the voice of Ruskin who was very keen on
art having didactic and moral functions, Pater doesn't believe in any of that, he wants
art to give very strong impressions, he wants art to be rooted in pleasure, for example
this is all very controversial stuff.
To give you a flavour of what Pater sounds like I can read out a little bit from his
famous description of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo's painting in the Louvre, Pater writes, this
is a description of the painting.
She is older than the rocks amongst which she sits, like the vampire she has been dead
many times and learned the secrets of the grave and has been a diver in deep seas and
keeps their fallen day about her and trafficked for strange webs with eastern merchants and
as later was the mother of Helena Troy and as Saint Anne the mother of Mary etc etc etc.
The idea of describing the Mona Lisa as a vampire is obviously a very striking one,
it has nothing to do with the painting as it actually is, it connotes a way of looking
at art which looks for something difficult, something strange in a picture that tries
to see something that perhaps is not even there in a picture that goes beyond representation
and Lee is obviously very very interested in that.
Lee would always be interested in ghosts for example and this way of talking about art
as a ghostly presence is something that she gets from Pater.
In terms of first impressions Pater strikes Lee as a dull man, dull is a word that she
repeats several times in her letters to her mother, Lee is not a kind or polite letter
writer, she is a very honest, very sharp writer, she wants to tell her mother what these people
really like but then she will grow to like Pater very much and the two will develop a
friendship that will be very important in fact to both, Pater had very few friends, very
few literary friends and when only is really the most important one for him.
