Writing under pressure: Maud Cruttwell and the old master monograph

A nineteenth-century invention, the old master monograph corresponded with the increasing interest in life writing among the reading public and the development of connoisseurship in art history. This article looks at the production and reception of two major monographs to gauge the contribution of Maud Cruttwell to the study of old masters. In particular, it discusses her interest in the personality of the artist as an aesthetic and ethical project that she perceived as a form of self-cultivation in the wake of Walter Pater’s aesthetics.