The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood

"MODERN PAINTERS" CONTINUED (1855-1856)

It was in the year 1855 that Ruskin first published "Notes on the Royal Academy and other Exhibitions." He had been so often called upon to write his opinion of Pre-Raphaelite pictures, either privately or to the newspapers, or to mark his friends' catalogues, that he found at last less trouble in printing his notes once for all. The new plan was immediately popular; three editions of the pamphlet were called for between June 1 and July 1. Next year he repeated the "Notes" and six editions were sold.

In spite of a dissentient voice here and there, he was really by that time recognised as the leading authority upon taste in painting. He was trusted by a great section of the public, who had not failed to notice how completely he and his friends were winning the day. The proof of it was in the fact that they were being imitated on all sides; Ruskinism in writing and Pre-Raphaelitism in painting were becoming fashionable.

But at the same time the movement gave rise to the Naturalist-landscape school, a group of painters who threw overboard the traditions of Turner and Prout, Constable and Harding, and the rest, just as the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren threw over the Academical masters. For such men their study was their picture; they devised tents and huts in wild glens and upon waste moors, and spent weeks in elaborating their details directly from nature, instead of painting at home from sketches on the spot.

This was the fulfilment of his advice to young artists; and so far as young artists worked in this way, for purposes of study, he encouraged them. But he did not fail to point out that this was not all that could be required of them. Even such a work as Brett's "Val d'Aosta," marvellous as it was in observation and finish, was only the beginning of a new era, not its consummation. It was not the painting of detail that could make a great artist; but the knowledge of it, and the masterly use of such knowledge. A great landscapist would know the facts and effects of nature, just as Tintoret knew the form of the human figure; and he would treat them with the same freedom, as the means of expressing great ideas, of affording by the imagination noble grounds for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854, was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was only the rant and bombast of landscape art.

With such feelings as these he wrote the third and fourth volumes of "Modern Painters," (published respectively January 15 and April 14, 1856). The work was afterwards interrupted only by a recurrence of his old cough, in the exceptionally cold summer of 1855. He went down to Tunbridge Wells, where his cousin, William Richardson of Perth, was practising as a doctor; it was not long before the cough gave way to treatment, and he was as busy as ever. About October of that year he wrote to Mrs. Carlyle as follows, in a letter printed by Professor C.E. Norton, conveniently summing up his year:

"Not that I have not been busy—and very busy, too. I have written, since May, good six hundred pages, had them rewritten, cut up, corrected, and got fairly ready for press—and am going to press with the first of them on Gunpowder Plot day, with a great hope of disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have prepared above thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and etched some on steel myself. In the course of the six hundred pages I have had to make various remarks on German Metaphysics, on Poetry, Political Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress, Agriculture, Horticulture, and Navigation,[⁶] all of which subjects I have had to 'read up' accordingly, and this takes time. Moreover, I have had my class of workmen out sketching every week in the fields during the summer; and have been studying Spanish proverbs with my father's partner, who came over from Spain to see the Great Exhibition. I have also designed and drawn a window for the Museum at Oxford; and have every now and then had to look over a parcel of five or six new designs for fronts and backs to the said Museum.

"During my above-mentioned studies of horticulture, I became dissatisfied with the Linnæan, Jussieuan, and Everybody-elseian arrangement of plants, and have accordingly arranged a system of my own; and unbound my botanical book, and rebound it in brighter green, with all the pages through-other, and backside foremost—so as to cut off all the old paging numerals; and am now printing my new arrangement in a legible manner, on interleaved foolscap. I consider this arrangement one of my great achievements of the year. My studies of political economy have induced me to think also that nobody knows anything about that; and I am at present engaged in an investigation, on independent principles, of the natures of money, rent, and taxes, in an abstract form, which sometimes keeps me awake all night. My studies of German metaphysics have also induced me to think that the Germans don't know anything about them; and to engage in a serious enquiry into the meaning of Bunsen's great sentence in the beginning of the second volume of the 'Hippolytus,' about the Finite realization of Infinity; which has given me some trouble.

"The course of my studies of Navigation necessitated my going to Deal to look at the Deal boats; and those of geology to rearrange all my minerals (and wash a good many, which, I am sorry to say, I found wanted it). I have also several pupils, far and near, in the art of illumination; an American young lady to direct in the study of landscape painting, and a Yorkshire young lady to direct in the purchase of Turners,—and various little bye things besides. But I am coming to see you."

The tone of humorous exaggeration of his discoveries and occupations was very characteristic. But he was then growing into the habit of leaving the matter in hand, as he often did afterwards, to follow side issues, and to take up new studies with a hasty and divided attention; the result of which was seen in his sub-title for the third volume of "Modern Painters"—"Of Many Things"; which amused his readers not a little. But that he still had time for his friends is seen in the account of a visit to Denmark Hill, written this year by James Smetham.