Part 1.1857.--Only one hundred copies printed, and no further parts
issued.)
Writing (1858) to Mr. Norton of his whole work in arranging the Turner drawings, Mr. Ruskin said: “To show you a little what my work has been, I have facsimiled for you, as nearly as I could, one of the nineteen thousand sketches (comprised in the Turner bequest). It, like most of them, is not a sketch, but a group of sketches, made on both sides of the leaf of the note-book. The note-books vary in contents from sixty to ninety leaves: there are about two hundred books of the kind--three hundred and odd note-books in all; and each leaf has on an average this quantity of work, a great many leaves being slighter, some blank, but a great many also elaborate in the highest degree, some containing ten exquisite compositions on each side of the leaf, thus (see facsimile), each no bigger than this--and with about that quantity of work in each, but every touch of it inestimable, done with his whole soul in it. Generally the slighter sketches are written over it everywhere, as in the example inclosed, every incident being noted that was going on at the moment of the sketch.”--“List of Turner’s Drawings shown in connection with Mr. Norton’s Lectures.” Boston: 1874. p. 11. The facsimile alluded to by Mr. Norton is reproduced here.
[85] July 3, 1857, upon the vote of £23,165 for the National Gallery.
[86] The late Mr. Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who succeeded Mr. Uwins as Keeper of the National Gallery in 1855, and retained that office till his death in 1878.
[87] “The family of Darius at the feet of Alexander after the Battle of Issus,” purchased at Venice from the Pisani collection in 1857. Lord Elcho had complained in the course of the debate that the price, £13,650, paid for this picture, had been excessive; and in reply allusion was made to the still higher price (£23,000) paid for the “Immaculate Conception” of Murillo, purchased for the Louvre by Napoleon III., in 1852, from the collection of Marshal Soult.--Of the great Veronese, Mr. Ruskin also wrote thus: “It at once, to my mind, raises our National Gallery from a second-rate to a first-rate collection. I have always loved the master, and given much time to the study of his works, but this is the best I have ever seen.” (Turner Notes, 1857, ed. v., p. 89, note.) So again before the National Gallery Commission, earlier in the same year, he had said, “I am rejoiced to hear (of its rumored purchase). If it is confirmed, nothing will have given me such pleasure for a long time. I think it is the most precious Paul Veronese in the world, as far as the completeness of the picture goes, and quite a priceless picture.”
[88] The present letter was written in reply to a criticism, contained in the _Literary Gazette_ of November 6, 1858, on Mr. Ruskin’s “Catalogue of the Turner Sketches and Drawings exhibited at Marlborough House 1857-8.” The subjects of complaint made by the _Gazette_ sufficiently appear from this letter. They were, briefly, first, the mode of exhibition of the Turner Drawings proposed by Mr. Ruskin in his official report already alluded to, pp. 78 and 80, note; and, secondly, two alleged hyperboles and one omission in the Catalogue itself.
[89] The cloud-forms which have disappeared from the drawings may be seen in the engravings.
[90] “Notes on the _oil_ pictures,” to be distinguished from the later catalogue of the Turner sketches and drawings with which this letter directly deals. See ante, p. 88, note.
[91] By the way, you really ought to have given me some credit for the swivel frames in the desks of Marlborough House, which enable the public, however rough-handed, to see the drawings on both sides of the same leaf.[94]
[92] The rest of this letter may, with the exception of its two last paragraphs, and the slight alterations noted, be also found in “The Two Paths,” Appendix iv., “Subtlety of Hand” (pp. 226-9 of the new, and pp. 263-6 of the original edition), where the words bracketed [sic] in this reprint of it are, it will be seen, omitted.
[93] From a vignette design by Stothard of a single figure, to illustrate the poem “On a Tear.” (Rogers’ Poems, London, 1834 ed.)
[94] The identical frames, each containing examples of the sketches in pencil outline to which the letter alludes, may be seen in the windows of the lower rooms of the National Gallery, now devoted to the exhibition of the Turner drawings.
[95] Doubly emphasized in “The Two Paths,” where the words are printed thus: “_I still look with awe at the combined delicacy and precision of his hand;_ IT BEATS OPTICAL WORK OUT OF SIGHT.”
[96] “The Two paths” reprint has “put in italics.”
[97] The following note is here added to the reprint in “The Two Paths:” “A sketch, observe--not a printed drawing. Sketches are only proper subjects of comparison with each other when they contain about the same quantity of work: the test of their merit is the quantity of truth told with a given number of touches. The assertion in the Catalogue which this letter was written to defend was made respecting the sketch of Rome, No. 101.”
[98] No. 45 was a “Study of a Cutter.” Mr. Ruskin’s note to it in the Catalogue is partly as follows: “I have never seen any chalk sketch which for a moment could be compared with this for soul and power.... I should think that the power of it would be felt by most people; but if not, let those who do not feel its strength, try to copy it.” See the Catalogue under No. 45, as also under No. 71, referred to above.
[99] In a letter to Mr. Norton written in the same year as this one to the _Literary Gazette_, Mr. Ruskin thus speaks of the value of these plates: “Even those who know most of art may at first look be disappointed with the Liber Studiorum. For the nobleness of these designs is not more in what is done than in what _is not_ done in them. Every touch in these plates is related to every other, and has no permission of withdrawn, monastic virtue, but is only good in its connection with the rest, and in that connection infinitely and inimitably good. The showing how each of these designs is connected by all manner of strange intellectual chords and nerves with the pathos and history of this old English country of ours, and with the history of European mind from earliest mythology down to modern rationalism and irrationalism--all this was what I meant to try and show in my closing work; but long before that closing I felt it to be impossible.”--Extract from a letter of Mr. Ruskin, 1858, quoted in the “List of Turner Drawings, etc.,” already mentioned, p. 5.
[100] The _Literary Gazette_ of November 20, 1858, contains a reply to this letter, but as it did not provoke a further letter from Mr. Ruskin, it is not noticed in detail here.
[101] There was at the date of this and the following letter an exhibition of Turner drawings at the South Kensington Museum. These pictures have, however, been since removed to the National Gallery, and the only works of Turner now at Kensington, are some half dozen oil paintings belonging to the Sheepshanks collection, and about the same number of water-color drawings, which form part of the historical series of British water-color paintings.
[102] This refers to a letter signed “E. A. F.” which appeared in _The Times_ of October 19, 1859, advising the adoption of Mr. Gilbert Scott’s Gothic design for the Foreign Office in preference to any Classic design. The writer entered at some length into the principles of Gothic and Classic architecture, which he briefly summed up in the last sentence of his letter: “Gothic, then, is national; it is constructively real; it is equally adapted to all sorts of buildings; it is convenient; it is cheap. In none of these does Italian surpass it; in most of them it is very inferior to it.” See the letters on the Oxford Museum as to the adaptability of Gothic--included in Section vi. of these Letters on Art. With regard to the cheapness of Gothic, the correspondent of _The Times_ had pointed out that while it may be cheap and yet thoroughly good so far as it goes, Italian _must_ always be costly.
[103] Hardly a debate. Lord Francis Hervey had recently (June 30, 1876) put a question in the House of Commons to Lord Henry Lennox (First Commissioner of Works) as to whether it was the fact that many of Turner’s drawings were at that time stowed in the cellars of the National Gallery, and had never been exhibited. _The Daily Telegraph_ in a short article on the matter (July 1, 1876) appealed to Mr. Ruskin for his opinion on the exhibition of these drawings.
[104] Now I trust, under Mr. Poynter and Mr. Sparkes, undergoing thorough reform.{*}
{*} Mr. Poynter, R.A., was then, as now, Director, and Mr. Sparkes Head Master, of the Art School at the South Kensington Museum.
[105] For notes of these drawings see the Catalogue of the Turner Sketches and Drawings already mentioned--(_a_) The Battle of Fort Bard, Val d’Aosta, p. 32; (_b_) the Edinburgh, p. 30; and (_c_) the Ivy Bridge, Devon, p. 32.
[106] I have omitted to add to my note (p. 84) on Mr. Ruskin’s arrangement of the Turner drawings a reference to his own account of the labor which that arrangement involved, and of the condition in which he found the vast mass of the sketches. See “Modern Painters,” vol. v., Preface, p. vi.
[107] The Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, being the year in which the lectures contained in the “Political Economy of Art” were delivered. (See “A Joy for Ever”--Ruskin’s Works, vol. xi. p. 80.)
[108] “The Plains of Troy;”--see for a note of this drawing Mr. Ruskin’s Notes on his own “Turners,” 1878, p. 45, where he describes it as “one of the most elaborate of the Byron vignettes, and full of beauty,” adding that “the meaning of the sunset contending with the storm is the contest of the powers of Apollo and Athene;” and for the engraving of it, see Murray’s edition of Byron’s Life and Works (1832, seventeen volumes), where it forms the vignette title-page of vol.