Introduction

AT the end of the previous year, Joanna had been launched in the Saturday Review as an art critic. Her two articles on ‘Some of the French Pictures at the Paris Exposition’ excited intense interest and speculation. And though she was writing anonymously (her youth and gender were not initially known, though her cover was blown soon enough when the editor John D. Cook confided her identity to John Ruskin), her voice was sufficiently original and her opinions strongly enough expressed to attract attention. Spencer Hall, the librarian at the Athenaeum and a close friend of the family, was among the first to write to her following her debut: his letter, dated New Year's Day 1856, is characteristically elaborate, but his judgment is shrewd. Meanwhile, from Cook's point of view, his faith in his young protégée had been amply rewarded, and he proceeded to work on her to produce articles on the Royal Academy Exhibitions later in the year.

Her studies under Couture continued and her portrait of her Parisian landlady, Mme Héreau, was later accepted for the R.A. But it was becoming clear that Couture's influence on her work was not entirely benign. In one of her last extended commentaries, surviving in manuscript, Alice Street had the following to say about the influence of Couture on her mother's work.