[14]REFLECTION:
There is a cunning condition of mind that requires to know. On the Stock Exchange this insures safe investment. In the painting trade this would induce certain picture-makers to cross the river at noon, in a boat, before negotiating a Nocturne, in order to make sure of detail on the bank, that honestly the purchaser might exact, and out of which he might have been tricked by the Night!
Mr. Jones: "Absolutely none."[14]
Mr. Bowen: "Do you think two hundred guineas a large price for that picture?"
"The action of imagination of the highest power in Burne Jones, under the conditions of scholarship, of social beauty, and of social distress, which necessarily aid, thwart, and colour it in the nineteenth century, are alone in art,—unrivalled in their kind; and I know that these will be immortal, as the best things the mid-nineteenth century in England could do, in such true relations as it had, through all confusion, retained with the paternal and everlasting Art of the world."—John Ruskin, LL.D.: Fors Clavigera, July 2, 1877.
Mr. Jones: "Yes. When you think of the amount of earnest work done for a smaller sum."
Examination continued: "Does it show the finish of a complete work of art?"
"Not in any sense whatever. The picture representing a night scene on Battersea Bridge, is good in colour, but bewildering in form; and it has no composition and detail. A day or a day and a half seems a reasonable time within which to paint it. It shows no finish—it is simply a sketch. The nocturne in black and gold has not the merit of the other two pictures, and it would be impossible to call it a serious work of art. Mr. Whistler's picture is only one of the thousand failures to paint night. The picture is not worth two hundred guineas."
Mr. Bowen here proposed to ask the witness to look at a picture of Titian,[15] [15]"I believe the world may see another Titian, and another Raffaelle, before it sees another Rubens."—Mr. Ruskin. in order to show what finish was.[16] [16] ... "The Butcher's Dog, in the corner of Mr. Mulready's 'Butt,' displays, perhaps, the most wonderful, because the most dignified, finish ... and assuredly the most perfect unity of drawing and colour which the entire range of ancient and modern art can exhibit. Albert Durer is, indeed, the only rival who might be suggested."—John Ruskin Slade Professor of Art: Modern Painters.
Mr. Serjeant Parry objected.