To Ruskin, even more than with Turner, color was simply a means to an end,—the more perfect imitation of nature; hence his utter lack of sympathy for Whistler’s work.
To pure color arrangements Ruskin was blind. He demanded a relation and significance beyond the mere color harmony. Lines or waves of color placed side by side arbitrarily, and with no more relation to nature than so many notes of music, had no meaning for him, whereas for Whistler they meant practically all there is to the science and art of color.
To Ruskin the blue hair of a Greek statue would have seemed absurd and childish; to the Greek it would have been simply a color-note in the place where it was needed to perfect the color-scheme.
So utterly wanting is the sense of color-music in the modern world that we like our sculpture in either ghastly marble, or, still more perversely, with the yellow hues and dirt and dinginess wrought by time and the elements, whereas those who created the greatest sculpture known subdued all garish qualities by the use of gold and bronze and color, not imitatively, but arbitrarily, to please a highly cultivated fancy.
From descriptions of Ruskin’s home, “Brantwood,” it is clear that he had no craving for harmonious effects about him. Discords did not disturb him; he could return with no sensations of discomfort from the keen appreciation of natural beauties to rooms which would be intolerable to any one like Whistler with an instinct for proportion and color.
The house had “a stucco classic portico in the corner, painted and grained and heaped around with lucky horseshoes, highly black-leaded.” The incongruity of the painting and graining—so contrary to all Ruskin’s teachings—and black-leaded horseshoes surprised even his friendly biographer.
His own room “he papered with naturalistic fancies to his own taste,” and on the walls were “a Dürer engraving, some Prouts and Turners, a couple of old Venetian heads, and Meissonier’s ‘Napoleon,’”—a typical collector’s conglomeration.
The walls of the dining-room were painted “duck-egg,” whatever that color may be, and covered with an even more heterogeneous collection of pictures,—“the ‘Doge of Gritta,’ a bit saved from the great Titian that was burnt in the fire at the Ducal Palace in 1574; a couple of Tintorets; Turner and Reynolds, each painted by himself in youth; Raphael, by a pupil, so it is said; portraits of old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin and little John and his ‘boo hills.’”
His study was “papered with a pattern specially copied from Marco Marziali’s ‘Circumcision’ in the National Gallery, and hung with Turners.” There was a crimson arm-chair and a “polished-steel fender, very unartistic,” his biographer remarks; “red mahogany furniture, with startling shiny emerald leather chair-cushions; red carpet and green curtains.” This is the sort of room wherein Ruskin worked and wrote. It simply illustrates the truth that it is one thing to write and talk about color and a far different thing to really feel color.
It is the custom to call every man who paints in high key or uses brilliant colors a colorist, as Ruskin called Turner and Rubens colorists; but it is not the mere use of color that makes a man a colorist, but the use he makes of it, the object he has in mind in using it.