1 See the catalogue entry by Helen Ritchie (ed.), Designers & Jewellery 1850–1940: Jewellery and Metalwork from the Fitzwilliam Museum, exh. cat., Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 2018, London, Philip Wilson, 2018, p. 103–15. My thanks to Helen Ritchie both for her correspondence on the miniature and for her help in handling the object.
2 London, British Library (henceforth BL), Michael Field, Works and Days, Add MS 46790, accessed via the Michael Field Diary Project: https://michaelfielddiary.dartmouth.edu/, accessed 23/12/22. Carolyn Dever has recently described the diary as the ‘great unknown novel of the nineteenth century’: Carolyn Dever, Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022, p. 4.
3 BL Add MS 46790, fol. 66v.
4 For instance, Edith Cooper to Katharine Bradley, October 1885: ‘how shall I ever be a “wiftie” worthy of you? […] I have given myself to you as your spouse forever’: as in Sharon Bickle (ed.), The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876–1909, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2008, p. 155. Following the death of Cooper's father, the couple renewed their vows in 1897: Sharon Bickle, ‘Living “Wilfully”: The Same-Sex Marriage Ceremony of “Michael Field” by the Smutt River’, Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation, 41/1, 2016, p. 116–28.
5 As critics have pointed out, the male pseudonym was part of the couple’s complex gendered and erotic figuration. Marion Thain has described the role of the pseudonym in ‘figuring desire’, a queer reading which Sarah Parker reads as ’unsettl[ing] the oversimplified reading of the Field pseudonym as male masquerade’: Marion Thain, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 56; Sarah Parker, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2013, p. 49.
6 ‘Katherine H. Bradley’ and ‘Edith E. Cooper’ (1891), The National Archives of the UK (TNA), The Durdans, Reigate, Surrey PRO RG12/557, fol. 688, page 16; ‘Katharine H. Bradley’ and ‘Edith E. Cooper’ (1911), TNA, 1, The Paragon, Richmond Surrey, PRO RG14/ 3585: http://ancestry.co.uk, accessed 18/02/2022.
7 See Jill H. Ehnenn, Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late Victorian Culture, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2018 and Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds.), Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2019; for biographies of Michael Field see the early text by Mary C. Sturgeon, Michael Field, London, Harrap, 1922 as well as Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field, Bath, Absolute Press, 1998.
8 Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 84. See also Hilary Fraser, ‘A Visual Field: Michael Field and the Gaze’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34/2, 2006, p. 553–71.
9 Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘A Woman’s Touch: Michael Field, Botticelli and Queer Desire’, Botticelli Past and Present, Ana Debenedetti and Caroline Elam (eds.), London, UCL Press, 2019, p. 148–60. Sarah Parker, ‘Sister Arts: Michael Field and Mary Costelloe’, Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds.), op. cit., p. 100-22.
10 Dustin Friedman, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, p. 2.
11 Later printed in Michael Field, Wild Honey from Various Thyme, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1908, p. 166.
12 Ibid. The poem was part of a group of love poems written by Bradley for Cooper: Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds.), Michael Field, The Poet, Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press, 2009, p. 139.
13 BL Add MS 46790, fol. 61v.
14 Abigail Joseph, Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style, Delaware, University of Delaware Press, 2019, p. 7. On the limits of professionalization as a period model see Hilary Fraser, op. cit., cited n. 8, p. 15–39.
15 This is well-demonstrated in Jo Briggs, ‘Plural Anomalies: Gender and Sexuality in Bio-Critical Readings of Vernon Lee’, Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds.), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 160–73.
16 Amy von Lintel, Surveying the Field: The Popular Origins of Art History in Britain and France, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, 2010, p. 318.
17 On the use of ‘queer’ to signal a particular configuration between body and subject see William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 133–134. Friedman has shown the ‘vital role art can play in developing self-determining queer identities’, arguing that queerness animated nineteenth-century aestheticism: Dustin Friedman, op. cit., p. 6–7.
18 ‘The background is pure azure’: BL Add MS 46777, fol. 48v.
19 Ricketts also mentions several Quattrocento portraits in his diary, including Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of Giovanni degli Albizzi Tornabuoni and Botticelli’s Idealised Portrait: for more on Ricketts’ engagement with the early renaissance and contemporary linkage of the pendant to this period see Helen Ritchie, ‘The Portrait Jewels of Charles Ricketts (1866–1931)’, The Journal of the Society of Jewellery Historians, 3, 2020, p. 4–17.
20 BL Add MS 46790, fol. 169.
21 BL Add MS 46790, fol. 61v.
22 BL Add MS 46790, fol. 66v.
23 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 3.
24 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 13v.
25 Bradley to Frances and John Brookes, 28 October 1894, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.Lett.e.143, fol. 202v as in Thain, 2007, cited n. 6, p. 50. ‘Henry’ was one of a number of names for Cooper.
26 See John Potvin, ‘Vale(d) Decadence: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and the Wilde Factor’, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 81–123, and Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
27 Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 244–8 and p. 258–66.
28 The Fields enjoyed a comfortable private income, but occasionally recorded minor financial obstacles, as in 1894 when they noted that ‘we have no money; it is impossible we should join Bernhard + Mary in Paris’: BL Add MS 46782, fol. 41.
29 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 46v. See Martha Vicinus, ‘“Sister Souls”: Bernard Berenson and Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper)’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 60/3, 2005, p. 326–54; Sarah Parker, op. cit., 2013, p. 52–70.
30 BL Add MS 46783, fol. 86. Cooper reflected in 1893 that writing croquis was the ‘direct consequence of Bernhard's influence’: BL Add 46781, fol. 104. On move away from croquis see BL Add MS 46785, fol. 46v. On Berenson’s involvement see Sarah Parker, op. cit., 2013, p. 64. See also Sarah Parker and Alex Murray, Michael Field: ‘For That Moment Only’ and other Prose Works, Cambridge, Modern Humanities Research, 2022.
31 Berenson to ‘Field’ (Cooper), 11 October 1893, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.d.408, fol. 76; ‘He says I am the only person of his own age with whom he can discuss…literature or art entirely on its own terms’: BL Add MS 46781, fol. 83v.
32 BL Add MS 46783, fol. 81v.
33 Ibid. On gendered expertise see Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella, ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources, 33/1–2, 2017, p. 1–10 and Amy von Lintel, ‘“Excessive Industry”: Female Art Historians, Popular Publishing and Professional Access’, Women Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (eds.), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, p. 115–30.
34 ‘We were induced to visit Paris on the condition that we should receive guidance to an understanding of recent art + Morellian help in the Louvre’: BL Add MS 46780, fol. 114v–115.
35 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 126.
36 For a comparable instance see Stefano Evangelista, ‘Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism’, Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds.), op. cit., 2006, p. 91–111.
37 Hilary Fraser, 2014, cited n. 8, p. 3.
38 Michael Field, ‘Effigies’, Art Review, 3 March 1890, p. 89-91. On this essay see Catherine Maxwell, ‘Michael Field, Death, and the Effigy’, Word & Image, 34/1, 2018, p. 31–9.
39 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 134.
40 On shift away from Berenson, see their mixed reaction to Berenson’s 1896 publication Florentine Painting, ‘its pedestrian quality, its ineffectiveness’: BL Add 46785, fol. 36v.
41 BL Add MS 46783, fol. 60 and 51; BL Add MS 46782, fol. 89v.
42 Ana Parejo Vadillo, ‘Sculpture, Poetics, Marble Books: Casting Michael Field’, Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds.), op. cit., p. 67–100; Bradley to Cooper, 21 August 1880, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.c. 418, fol. 25.
43 Bradley to Cooper, 13 September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 41; See Bradley’s notebook at Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.Misc.e.337.
44 Bradley to Cooper, August and September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 22 & 24.
45 See Patricia Pulham, The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, p. 183–99 and Jana Funke and Jen Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
46 Bradley to Cooper, September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 24.
47 Bradley to Cooper, September 1880: Ibid.
48 Cooper to Bradley, 24 August 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 19.
49 Walter Pater had famously described this scene in his essay on Winckelmann in 1867: Walter Pater, ‘Art. IV. - Winckelmann’, Westminster Review, 31/1, 1867, p. 80–110. On this treatment of Winckelmann see Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe, ‘Pater’s “Winckelmann”’, Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception and Aestheticism, Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 63–77. Bradley mentions reading Winckelmann as early as 1880: Bradley to Cooper, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 13.
50 Bradley to Cooper, 26 August 1880, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 18.
52 Cooper to Bradley, September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 35.
53 Cooper to Bradley, September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 36.
54 Bradley to Cooper, September 1880, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, fol. 20.
55 ‘Sim on Olympia’: BL Add MS 46780, fol. 119; BL Add MS 46779, fol. 126. As previously noted, Michael Field used a range of nicknames for each other. Sim refers to Bradley, and P to ‘Puss’, one of the names of Cooper.
56 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty & Ugliness: And Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, London, John Lane, 1912, esp. p. 241–351; Parker and Murray, op. cit. p. 35. See Kirsty Bunting, ‘“Feelings of Vivid Fellowship”: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative “Aesthetic Sociability”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52/2, 2016, p. 203–17. And about their collective thinking on architecture in particular, see the essay by Francesco Ventrella in this volume.
57 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, op. cit., 1912., p. 285 and 282.
58 BL Add MS 46783, fol. 57.
59 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 111v–12.
60 On personhood and painting see Francesco Ventrella, ‘Befriending Botticelli’, Ana Debenedetti and Caroline Elam (eds.), op. cit., p. 116–47.
61 ‘Oh that Venus of Giorgione, the long undulating body…the curves + fluctuations of the landscape!’: BL Add MS 46779, fol. 19v.
62 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 22.
63 Michael Field, Long Ago, London, Bell, 1889; On landscape in Long Ago see Yopie Prins, ‘A Metaphorical Field: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper’, Victorian Poetry, 33/1, 1995, p. 129–48. Martha Vicinus notes the popularity of natural metaphors to describe female eroticism and sexuality by Sapphic couples: Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
64 Henry Wharton addressed Michael Field as ‘Sir’ in correspondence about the translations: Henry Wharton to Michael Field, November 24 and 30 1888, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.e.33, fol. 7 and 8; BL Add MS 46779, fol. 138. On working from the fragments see Yopie Prins, ‘Sappho Doubled: Michael Field’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 8/1, 1995, p. 165–86.
65 BL Add 46779, fol. 120-21v; See Linda K. Hughes, Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, p. 129-43.
66 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 68.
67 As in Bernhard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, with an index of reference to their works, London, G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1897, p. 37–8.
68 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 68.
69 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 69.
70 Michael Field, Sight and Song, London, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892.
71 S. Brooke Cameron, ‘The Pleasures of Looking and the Feminine Gaze in Michael Field’s “Sight and Song”’, Victorian Poetry, 51/2, 2013, p. 147–75; Marion Thain suggests that the process is closer to synaesthesia: Marion Thain, op. cit., p. 66–89.
72 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 137v.
73 Michael Field, op. cit., 1892, p. v.
74 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, London, Macmillan & Co., 1873.
75 Alice Trusted to Edith Cooper, 22 May 1892, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.lett.e.33, fol. 112.
76 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sight and Song’, The Bookman, 2/10, July 1892, p. 116.
77 On the reception of the work see Dominique Gracia, ‘The one question is not what you mean but what you do’: ‘Michael Field’s Ekphrastic Verse’, Victorian Poetry 57/3, 2019, p. 345-64.
78 For instance, Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 74–111.
79 Shanyn Fiske, Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece and the Victorian Popular Imagination, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2008.
80 See J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 2–16 and 239–72; John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (eds.), Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005; Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017.
81 For an overview of the British context see Griselda Pollock, ‘Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland’, Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, Kitty Ziljmans et al. (eds.), Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2012, p. 355–78.
82 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 91–91v.
83 See contributions in special issue ‘Old Masters, Modern Women’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 28, 2019, https://19.bbk.ac.uk/issue/116/info/, accessed 17/11/2021.
84 Shanyn Fiske, op. cit., p. 17–18.
85 This counter-discursive possibility may also be related to what Christa Zorn describes as ‘alter-histories’: Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2003, p. 27–8.
86 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 57.
87 Algernon Swinburne, ‘Notes on Designs of Old Masters at Florence’, Fortnightly Review, 4/9, July 1868, p. 16–40. On this see Stefano Evangelista, ‘Swinburne’s Galleries’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 40/1-2, 2010, p. 160–79 and Lene Østermark-Johansen, ‘Swinburne’s Serpentine Delights: The Aesthetic Critic and the Old Master Drawings in Florence’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24/1, 2002, p. 49–66.
88 BL Add MS 46779, fol. 56v-57.
89 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 63.
90 BL Add MS 46783, fol. 41v.
91 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 43v-44.
92 BL Add MS 46781, fol. 104.
93 BL Add MS 46785, fol. 94.
94 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 108v; BL Add MS 46781, fol. 47. Their attachment to Botticelli would, however, come under scrutiny: Anna Gruetzner Robins, op. cit., p. 158.
95 BL Add MS 46781, fol. 47v. See Ana Parejo Vadillo, ‘Aestheticism and Decoration: At Home with Michael Field’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 74, 2011, p. 17–36.
96 Michael Field to Berenson, 2 December 1892, Florence, Villa I Tatti, Berenson Archive, 702291, Ms. 242.
97 The importance of photography for ‘new criticism’ was highlighted in an article by Mary Costelloe, ‘The New and Old Criticism’, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 35/207, May 1894, p. 828–37.
98 Michael Field to Berenson, 2 December 1892, Florence, Villa I Tatti, Berenson Archive, 702291, Ms. 242.
99 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 12.
102 Cooper to Mary Costelloe, 1892, Florence, Villa I Tatti, Berenson Archive, 702477, Ms. 162.
103 Cooper to Bradley, 12-14 September 1880: Sharon Bickle, op. cit., p. 39.
104 Ana Parejo Vadillo, n. 100, op cit., p. 13.
105 Durdans was then the residence of Michael Field; Michael Field to Berenson [copy of], Good Friday 1895, Bodleian Library, Ms.Eng.Lett. 408, fol. 37; BL Add MS 46783, fol. 59.
106 BL Add MS 46785, fol. 49v.
107 Add MS 46782, fol. 47–47v.
108 BL Add 46782, fol. 46v; BL Add MS 46779, fol. 35.
109 Letter from Berenson to Michael Field, [5?] February 1892, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.Lett.408, fol. 56; for instance, ‘M. Berenson assures us he is the faun, the faun of Callirrhoe’: BL Add MS 46779, fol. 19v.
110 BL Add MS 46781, fol. 52; BL Add MS 46783, fol. 88v.
111 See Bernd Roeck’s depiction of Florence around 1900, where the Fields appear only as ‘two eccentric Victorian women’: Bernd Roeck, Florence 1900: The Quest for Arcadia, trans. Stewart Spencer, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 129.
112 Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Bernard Berenson and Aby Warburg: Absolute Opposites’, Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman (eds.), Boston Mass., The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014, p. 143–72.
113 BL Add MS 46778, fol. 97.
114 BL Add MS 46780, fol. 54–54v.
115 BL Add MS 46782, fol. 143v.