Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]

 Our chief object at present is to investigate the connexion of photography with art—to decide how far the sun may be considered an artist... (1857) 
 Every individual who launches his happiness on this stream [of photography] finds currents and rocks not laid down in the chart. Every sanguine little couple who set up a glass-house at the commencement of summer, call their friends about them, and toil alternately in broiling light and stifling gloom, have said before long, in their hearts, “Photography, thy name is disappointment!” (1857) 
 Thus are the incidents of time, and the forms of space, simultaneously recorded; and every picture becomes an authentic chapter in the history of the world. (1857) 
 ...no photographic picture that ever was taken... of any thing, or scene, however defective when measured by an artistic scale, is destitute of a special, and what we may call an historic interest... Though the faces of our children may not be modelled and rounded with that truth and beauty which art attains, yet minor things—the very shoes of the one, the inseparable toy of the other—are given with a strength of identity which art does not even seek. (1857) 
 Where ten self-styled artists eked out a precarious living by painting inferior miniatures, ten times that number now earn their bread by supplying photographic portraits. (1857) 
 The small attempts at architecture have swelled into monumental representations of a magnitude, truth, and beauty which no art can surpass—animals, flowers, pictures, engravings, all come within the grasp of the photographer; and last, and finest, and most interesting of all, the sky with its shifting clouds, and the sea with its heaving waves, are overtaken in their course by a power more rapid than themselves. (1857) 
 [Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in small minority, but the craving, or rather the necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view. (1857) 
 What indeed are... these facial maps called photographic portraits, but accurate landmarks and measurements for loving eyes and memories to deck with beauty and animate with expression, in perfect certainty, that the ground-plan is founded upon fact?