(Miss Brickhill, photographer)
RUSKIN'S STUDY AT BRANTWOOD
But it is about another kind of chair that I have more to say in this first chapter, if you will forgive the pun; the metaphorical chair which professors are supposed to fill at the University. Ruskin's was nominally that of Fine Art, but he was really a sort of teaching Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things in General. His chair stood on four legs, or even more, like some antique settles of carved oak; very unlike the Swiss milking-stool of the modern specialist. Not that it stood more firmly; good business-folk, whose sons fell under his influence, and dons with an eye to college successes in the schools, thought his teaching deplorable; and from their point of view much was to be said. It cannot be denied, also, that like the born teacher he was, he sometimes tried to make silk purses out of sows' ears.
He taught none of us to paint saleable pictures nor to write popular books. A pupil once asked him outright to do so. "I hope you're not serious," he replied. To learn the artist's trade he definitely advised going to the Royal Academy schools; his drawing school at Oxford was meant for an almost opposite purpose—to show the average amateur that really Fine Art is a worshipful thing, far beyond him; to be appreciated (and that alone is worth while) after a course of training, but never to be attained unless by birth-gift.
At the start this school, provided by the Professor at his own cost of time, trouble and money, was well attended; in the second year there were rarely more than three pupils. It was in 1872 that I joined it, having seen him before, introduced by Mr. Alfred W. Hunt, R.W.S., the landscape painter. Ruskin asked to see what I had been doing, and I showed him a niggled and panoramic bit of lake-scenery. "Yes, you have been looking at Hunt and Inchbold." I hoped I had been looking at Nature. "You must learn to draw." Dear me! thought I, and I have been exhibiting landscapes. "And you try to put in more than you can manage." Well, I supposed he would have given me a good word for that!
So he set me to facsimile what seemed like a tangle of scrabbles in charcoal, and I bungled it. Whereupon I had to do it again, and was a most miserable undergraduate. But the nice thing about him was that he did not say, "Go away; you are no good"; but set me something drier and harder still. I had not the least idea what it was all coming to; though there was the satisfaction of looking through the sliding cases between whiles at "Liber Studiorum" plates—rather ugly, some of them, I whispered to myself—and little scraps of Holbein and Burne-Jones, quite delicious, for I had the pre-Raphaelite measles badly just then, in reaction from the water-colour landscape in which I had been brought up. Only I was too ignorant to see, till he showed me, that the virtue of real pre-Raphaelite draughtsmanship was in faithfulness to natural form, and resulting sensitiveness to harmony of line; nothing to do with sham mediævalism and hard contours.
By-and-by he promoted me to Burne-Jones's "Psyche received into Heaven." What rapture at the start, and what trials before that facsimile was completed! And when all was done, "That's not the way to draw a foot," said a popular artist who saw the copy. But that was the way to use the pure line, and who but Ruskin taught it at the time?