ABSTRACT
The significance of the sentimental in Victorian culture has long been recognized. Many prominent artists and critics espoused sentimentalism as a form of heightened sensitivity which was not only a key aspect of refined artistic taste and expert critical judgement but also, crucially, a stimulus for feelings of companionship, compassion, and benevolence. A series of recent critical studies has deepened our understanding of how, across a range of nineteenth-century literary and visual arts, sentimentalism challenges the hierarchies of high and low art, the binaries of public and private space, and the value-laden ascriptions of masculine and feminine forms of feeling. The activity and reception of Joachim in the Victorian salon makes a fascinating musical case study of nineteenth-century sentimentalism as it is one which brings music within a discourse that broadens and enriches Ruskin's ideas. The tones and form of the lamplight portrait of Joachim are akin to Watts's ‘moonlight’ portrait of Tennyson from a few years earlier.
