[1] “The Bibliography of Ruskin: a bibliographical list, arranged in chronological order, of the published writings of John Ruskin, M.A. (From 1834 to 1879.)” By Richard Herne Shepherd.
[2] The letter out of which it took its rise, however, will be found on the 82d page of the first volume; and with regard to it, and especially to the mention of Mr. Frith’s picture in it, reference should be made to part of a further letter in the Art Journal of this month.
“I owe some apology, by the way, to Mr. Frith, for the way I spoke of his picture in my letter to the Leicester committee, not intended for publication, though I never write what I would not allow to be published, and was glad that they asked leave to print it.” (Art Journal, August, 1880, where this sentence is further explained.)
[3] Some of the notes, it will be remarked, are in larger type than the rest; these are Mr. Ruskin’s original notes to the letters as first published, and are in fact part of them; and they are so printed to distinguish them from the other notes, for which I am responsible.
[4] It should be 16th, the criticism having appeared in the preceding weekly issue.
[5] See “Modern Painters,” vol. i. p. 159 (Pt. II. § 2, cap. 2, § 5). “Again, take any important group of trees, I do not care whose,—Claude’s, Salvator’s, or Poussin’s,—with lateral light (that in the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, or Gaspar’s Sacrifice of Isaac, for instance); can it be supposed that those murky browns and melancholy greens are representative of the tints of leaves under full noonday sun?” The picture in question is, it need hardly be said, in the National Gallery (No. 31).
[6] See “Modern Painters,” vol. i. pp. 157-8 (Pt. II. § ii., cap. 2, § 4). The critic of the Chronicle had written that the rocky mountains in this picture “are not sky-blue, neither are they near enough for detail of crag to be seen, neither are they in full light, but are quite as indistinct as they would be in nature, and just the color.” The picture is No. 84 in the National Gallery.
[7] See “Modern Painters,” vol. i. p. 184 (Pt. II. § ii., cap. 4, § 6). “Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving anything like completeness to the forms of the near objects. This, observe, is not done by slurred or soft lines (always the sign of vice in art), but by a decisive imperfection, a firm but partial assertion of form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon, nor cling to, nor entirely understand, and from which it is driven away of necessity to those parts of distance on which it is intended to repose.” To this the critic of the Chronicle had objected, attempting to show that it would result in Nature being “represented with just half the quantity of light and color that she possesses.”
[8] The passage in the Chronicle ran thus: “The Apollo is but an ideal of the human form; no figure ever moulded of flesh and blood was like it.” With the objection to this criticism we may compare “Modern Painters” (vol. i. p. 27), where the ideal is defined as “the utmost degree of beauty of which the species is capable.” See also vol. ii. p. 99: “The perfect idea of the form and condition in which all the properties of the species are fully developed is called the Ideal of the species;” and “That unfortunate distinctness between Idealism and Realism which leads most people to imagine that the Ideal is opposed to the Real, and therefore false.”
[9] This picture of Sir David Wilkie’s was presented to the National Gallery (No. 99) by Sir George Beaumont, in 1826.