Essentially a biography of Sir Charles Eastlake, Art for the Nation traces Eastlake's beginnings as an artist and his long career as a British arts administrator. This book, however, offers much more than a general recounting of the life of an important Victorian figure. It responds to David Robertson's Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (1978) by providing a study of the Eastlake family—Sir Charles, his wife Lady Elizabeth, and their nephew Charles—which also functions as an institutional history of the arts in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors challenge the long received views of Sir Charles as an unoriginal painter and a conservative, conventional establishment figure and Lady Elizabeth as the outspoken enemy of John Ruskin and critic of the Pre-Raphealites. In this study, the Eastlakes emerge as “more complex, even contradictory,” demonstrating a remarkable independence of thought, an efficiency of task management, and an approach to art history and museum administration that was indeed radical due to their close connections with Continental models (xv).

The book positions the Eastlakes as crucial contributors to the rapid institutionalization of the arts during Victoria's reign, especially in the development of the National Gallery in London. Both Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865) and his nephew, Charles Locke Eastlake (1833–1906)—an eponymy that has caused some confusion—served at the National Gallery: Sir Charles as its keeper from 1843 to 1847 and its first director from 1855 until his death in 1865; and nephew Charles as its keeper from 1878 to 1898. The name of Eastlake, as the authors point out, was associated with this institution for more than half a century, a tenure that brought the gallery from an amateur organization to a professional and established museum.

While rewriting our understanding of the Eastlakes and their influence, Avery-Quash and Sheldon offer a useful model for how to deal biographically with a dynamic married couple, recognizing both their independent identities and their actual collaborations. The authors deploy a refreshing common sense in their characterization of this union, while they also return to the documentation, looking at the personal and published writings of both Charles and Elizabeth “in tandem” to provide a clearer, more historically grounded picture of their partnership (142). Each author has recently undertaken the labor of editing publications of relevant source documents: Avery-Quash issued an edition of Charles's notebooks, and Sheldon edited a volume of Elizabeth's letters. This labor, in addition to their collaborative volume here, will surely encourage future scholarship on this important pair, not to mention the dense network of other significant period figures to whom they were connected.

The international scope of this study, which continuously keeps its British story in perspective with broader European developments, is a welcome change from much scholarship on Victorian Britain. However, the authors underemphasize one of their most important interventions: the assertion of Britain's unique significance in the history of art history. Normally overshadowed by Continental developments, British art historians nonetheless contributed to the rise of this distinctly transnational discipline, a fact that we discover in this study on the Eastlake family. In dialogue with their German and Italian colleagues—Johann David Passavant, Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, Gustav Waagen, and Giovanni Morelli, for instance—the Eastlakes participated in professional debates regarding the role of primary documentation, the practices of connoisseurship, the historical hanging of galleries, and the use of both museum labels and collection catalogs. Moreover, the British context had interesting and noteworthy particularities, which the Eastlakes represent so clearly but to which the authors do not draw our attention. In Britain, the credentials for doing art historical work did not involve university-level training in the field, as they did in Germany from the 1840s, for example. Rather, British art historians, like the Eastlakes, honed their skills through a combination of fine art studies, foreign travel, proficiency in multiple languages, translations of foreign scholarship, and the authorship of articles and books on art. In histories of art history, a focus on the university context has suppressed these alternative career paths that predominated in Britain.

The authors could also have done more with the issues of gender that emerge in this study. It would have been worth underscoring that while the art historical credentials of Sir Charles and his wife were nearly identical, the doors for well-paid administrative positions were thrown wide open for Charles, whereas Elizabeth could only assert her influence in unofficial capacities as a writer, as an adviser for her husband, or as a recommender for her nephew. The authors rightly point out how she could not even inherit her husband's property when he died in 1865; the Married Women's Property Act was passed in 1882. While women managed to make more inroads into art historical careers in Britain than on the European continent, we can appreciate, through this account of Elizabeth Eastlake, the limitations they faced.

The writing style of this long and detailed study makes it a pleasure to read, as it mirrors the opinionated wit and insight of Lady Eastlake's prose with very little of the dryness of her husband's pen. Indeed, the work succeeds in doing what it claims: it “personalizes the history” of the Victorian art world (xvi). It balances strong and clear argumentation with juicy biographical anecdotes, as we learn that Charles and Elizabeth shared the same birthday; that Charles touched the Elgin marbles before they reached the British Museum; that Elizabeth's mother and father, aged forty and seventy; gave birth to quadruplets; or that Ralph Wornum, Keeper of the National Gallery under Eastlake, lived in the basement of the museum with his fourteen children “alongside the rats” (137). In conclusion, this book will easily appeal to anyone interested in Victorian history, in museum history, in the history of art history, or in the lives of surprisingly colorful and highly influential people.