It would take too long to continue the narrative of Ruskin's labours: the four hundred cabinets designed by him to contain the drawings; his privately printed catalogue; the official catalogue; his division, interesting but bewildering, of the Exhibited water-colours into groups; his notes upon them, delightful to the dilettante, but of little service to the student.
The Unexhibited drawings were arranged by Ruskin in three hundred and eight parcels, and classified by him according to his theory of their artistic value.
71 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'R,' meaning, right
in intention.
124 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'M,' meaning, middling
value.
108 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'O,' meaning, entire
rubbish.
5 were marked as unexamined.
Never was man less suited to the task of cataloguing, which should be absolutely methodical and entirely unfanciful, than John Ruskin. In a letter to the Keeper (Mr. R. N. Wornum), enclosing his catalogue, Mr. Ruskin referred to the lettering on the parcels as horrible, and added, 'I never meant it to be permanent.'
For long it seemed as if the neglect of the tin boxes, containing the parcels of unexhibited drawings, would be permanent. Mildew formed on them, 'the contents of the tin boxes were in a dirty state, with broken pieces of old sealing-wax, tattered fragments of string, dusty brown paper, etc., etc.' In 1862 Ruskin, with the assistance of Mr. George Allen, effected a kind of spring cleaning. 'I've got the mildew off,' he wrote, 'as well as I could, and henceforth I've done with the whole business; and have told them they must take it off themselves next time or leave it on—if they like.' When Mr. E. T. Cook, who, in his book on the Turner Drawings, did so much to arouse public interest in the 'buried Turners,' saw the tin boxes in 1904, the 'mildew was on.' But the period of neglect of the unexhibited portion of the Turner Bequest was nearly at an end.
In 1905 Mr. A. J. Finberg was invited by the Trustees of the National Gallery to classify the '19,049 pieces of paper' chronologically, to re-arrange the Sketch-Books in order, and to compile a chronological and descriptive Inventory of all the unexhibited Turner sketches. Later it was decided to include the whole collection of exhibited drawings and sketches. The work occupied Mr. Finberg's entire time for four years, and the result was made public in 1909, when a Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest was published as described in Chapter IV. The exhibited water-colours, as well as all the sketches, are included in the Inventory. Perhaps for the sake of accuracy, it would have been better if Ruskin had never touched the seven tin boxes. In following the communings of Turner with nature, he disintegrated many of the Sketch-Books (over 150 were dismembered), removed a leaf here and there, omitted to number them, gave the sketches Ruskinian titles, and made the task of re-arranging them in chronological or topographical order almost impossible. Mr. Finberg allows himself the following gentle and amusing reproof of his great predecessor: 'The question of dates had little or no interest for Mr. Ruskin; on such questions he is, as M. Cherfils grimly remarks, "plus que sobre."'
In 1878, when a selection of nearly three hundred drawings and sketches were exhibited on the ground floor of the eastern wing of the National Gallery, the Turner water-colour rooms became a place of pilgrimage; still more so when additional rooms were added, and the sepia drawings for the Liber were displayed. The collection was changed quarterly, and for years many made a point of visiting those little rooms each time that the change was made. Who did not love the 'delight drawings'? who did not wonder anew each visit at their beauty? Students copied and re-copied them, desiring nothing better in life than to sit there, through long days, trying to follow the Master's vision.
So the years passed. Turner was a classic; his environment was fixed. It seemed as if no alteration would ever be made in the crowded gallery where his oil pictures hung, overflowing into the adjoining room, or in the series of little rooms on the ground floor which we visited at each re-hanging, greeting the water-colours at each encounter like the faces, loved and lost awhile, of old friends. It was enough to know when we missed them, that they would return again, and that the 'buried Turners,' the Sketch-Books with their thousands of pages, each containing something of the Master's work, were being cared for. Turner was firmly settled in his niche in the Temple of Fame. It seemed that nothing more could ever happen to him.
Then suddenly, in the month of May 1906, something did happen: something that made the art sensation of the year.