This article focuses on a selection of nineteenth-century female art critics and connoisseurs who were prominent art writers of their day but whose contribution to the critical history of sculpture has since fallen out of view. I argue that women modelled a sculptural discourse that was distinctive, often personally driven and biographically inflected, and gendered. They deployed various forms of life writing – biography, autobiography, memoir, personal reminiscence, Bildungsroman, letters, gallery journals – as a vehicle for connoisseurship about sculpture. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they understood the importance of personal networks in both the production and the reception of art. Furthermore, female writers responded to the corporeal connections between viewers, models and figurative sculpture in their work. Writing about the three-dimensional representation of the human body in sculptural form enabled women to comment obliquely on issues such as female creativity, sexuality and education.

中文翻译：

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女性与维多利亚时代雕塑话语的塑造

本文重点介绍了 19 世纪女性艺术评论家和鉴赏家的选择，她们是当时杰出的艺术作家，但后来她们对雕塑批评史的贡献已淡出人们的视野。我认为女性塑造了一种独特的雕塑话语，通常是个人驱动的、受传记影响的、性别化的。他们运用了各种形式的生活写作——传记、自传、回忆录、个人回忆、成长小说、信件、画廊期刊——作为对雕塑进行鉴赏的工具。从国际化的角度来看，他们理解个人网络在艺术创作和接受中的重要性。此外，女性作家对她们作品中观众、模特和具象雕塑之间的身体联系做出了回应。