Introduction

BETWEEN December 1855 and September 1856 Joanna contributed eight articles to the Saturday Review. This new weekly journal was the brainchild of an eccentric newspaper editor called John Douglas Cook and the first issue would appear on Saturday 3 November 1855. It had only just been launched when Cook accompanied his old friends the Farwells to Paris, with the aim of visiting the Exposition Universelle.

Joanna was originally introduced to the Farwell family by Henry, and she and Bertha, also an aspiring artist, became good friends. In a letter dated early October 1855,41 Bertha informed her that Mr Cook had intended to call on her before she left for Paris, but was too engaged starting a ‘new weekly paper’. On 27 October she wrote again:

Cook must have immediately recognised in Joanna a critic after his own heart. At his instigation, she wrote two articles on the French painters and paintings exhibited at the Exposition. Her letters show her to be forthright, opinionated and imaginative, and she brought all these qualities to bear on ‘Remarks on some of the French Pictures at the Paris Exhibition, 1855’, published on 1 and 27 December of that year. As the Exposition featured 699 French painters and a total of 1,872 works, and as both painters and their contributions had already been the subject of lively debate, it was a brave debut for a young woman (she was not yet 24). And though she was writing anonymously, that anonymity did not last long. Cook was far too proud of her.

Many of her opinions were rehearsed in her letters, in particular (and perhaps surprisingly) in a letter to her sister-in-law, Lilly, dated 5 November, in which she compares current English colourists unfavourably to Troyon and Couture (with whom she went on to study). Perhaps most intriguing is her dismissal of Ingres, something of a colossus who had been given his own salon in which to exhibit, as ‘a very little man to my mind’, who ‘usurps a whole room