George Eliot Image Gallery
Image Gallery
Even in an age of digitization, access to images of and pertaining to George Eliot has been very limited. The George Eliot Archive team has scoured out-of-print publications and other public domain sources to assemble the first image gallery of portraits of George Eliot and illustrations of her works. We freely share these collections here to advance multi-disciplinary inquiry. Please reference the George Eliot Archive when you pass them along.
George Eliot Portrait Gallery includes all the known portraits depicting George Eliot that she sat for during her lifetime and reproductions created from these in-person renderings—from the casual pencil sketches of amateur admirers to the art created by professionals after multiple sittings. The accompanying metadata provides contextualizing information about the artists, medium, and composition dates. An introductory essay highlights some of the challenges and mysteries regarding the provenance of several featured portraits.
George Eliot Illustration Gallery includes an ever-expanding collection of illustrations of George Eliot’s works. Currently, there are more than 300 images, most of them curated over many years from antique editions, some quite rare. Many of these illustrations will be unknown even to those familiar with the illustrated George Eliot's Works published by New York's Thomas Y. Crowell in 1894.
Also collected in their entirety for the first time in 2019 are Sir Frederic Leighton’s commissioned illustrations for Romola.
If you come across any images not already collected on this site, please let us know. We are also attempting to research the illustrators whose names rarely appear in the editions they illustrated or in the images themselves. To share information or corrections, contact Beverley Rilett at bdr0032@auburn.edu.