Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

[66] That the critique was sufficiently bitter, may be gathered from the following portions of it: “These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and an affected simplicity in painting.... We can extend no toleration to a mere senile imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude color of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery ‘snapped instead of folded;’ faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated to skeletons; color borrowed from the jars in a druggist’s shop, and expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity, deserves no quarter at the hands of the public.”

[67] A sacred picture (No. 518) upon the text, “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah xiii. 6). He had two other pictures in the Academy of 1850, namely, “Portrait of a gentleman and his grandchild” (No. 429), and “Ferdinand lured by Ariel” (No. 504)--Shakespeare, “Tempest,” Act ii. sc. 2.

[68] See the next letter, p. 96. With regard to the religious tone of some parts of Mr. Ruskin’s early writings, it is worth noting that in the recent reissue (1880) of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” “some pieces of rabid and utterly false Protestantism ... are cut from text and appendix alike.”--(Preface, p. 1; and see the note on one such omission on p. 19.) So again in the preface to the final edition of “Modern Painters,” issued in 1873, Mr. Ruskin stated that his objection to republishing unrevised the first two volumes of that work was that “they are written in a narrow enthusiasm, and the substance of their metaphysical and religious speculation is only justifiable on the ground of its absolute sincerity.”--See also “Sesame and Lilies,” 1871 ed., Preface, p. 2.

[69] The pre-Raphaelite pictures exhibited in the Academy of this year, and referred to here and in the following letter, were the “Mariana” (No. 561) of Millais, “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” (No. 651), and “The Woodman’s Daughter” (No. 799), (see Coventry Patmore’s Poems, vol. i. p. 184--4 vol. ed., 1879), both also by Millais; the “Valentine receiving (rescuing?) Sylvia from Proteus” (No. 594), of Holman Hunt; and the “Convent Thoughts” (No. 493) of Mr. C. Collins, to which were affixed the lines from “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Act i. sc. 1),

“Thrice blessed they, that master so their blood To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;”

and the verse (Psalm cxliii. 5), “I meditate on all Thy works; I muse on the work of Thy hands.” The last-named artist also had a portrait of Mr. William Bennett (No. 718) in the Exhibition--not, however, alluded to in this letter. Mr. Charles Allston Collins, who was the son of William Collins, R.A., and the younger brother of Mr. Wilkie Collins, subsequently turned his attention to literature, and may be remembered as the author of “A Cruise upon Wheels,” “The Eye-Witness,” and other writings.

[70] Compare “Modern Painters,” vol. i. p. 415, note, where allusion is made to the painters of a society which “unfortunately, or rather unwisely, has given itself the name of ‘Pre-Raphaelite;’ unfortunately, because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible degree of completion, what they see in nature, without reference to conventional established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any past epoch.”

[71] “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Act ii. sc. 4. The scene of the picture was taken from Act v. sc. 4.

[72] “The Hhareem” (No. 147), noticed, partly to the above effect, in _The Times_, May 1, 1850. It will be remembered that John Lewis is, with Turner, Millais, Prout, Mulready, and Edwin Landseer, one of the artists particularly mentioned in Mr. Ruskin’s pamphlet on “Pre-Raphaelitism” (1851), p. 33; and see also “Academy Notes,” III., 1857, p. 48.

[73] “I have great hope that they may become the foundation of a more earnest and able school of art than we have seen for centuries.”--“Modern Painters,” vol. i. p. 415, note.

[74] Of the two pictures described in this and the following letter, “The Light of the World” is well known from the engraving of it by W. H. Simmons. It was originally purchased by Mr. Thomas Combe, of Oxford, whose widow has recently presented it to Keble College, where it now hangs, in the library. The subject of the second picture, which is less well known, and which has never been engraved, sufficiently appears from the letter describing it.

[75] Mr. Dearle informs me that this picture was bought from the walls of the Academy by a prize-holder in the Art Union of London. He adds that the purchaser resided in either America or Australia, and that the picture is now, therefore, presumably in one or other of those countries.

[76] Shenstone: Elegy xxvi. The subject of the poem is that of the picture described here. The girl speaks--

“If through the garden’s flowery tribes I stray, Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure, Hope not,” etc.

The prize of the Liverpool Academy was awarded in 1858 to Millais’s “Blind Girl.” Popular feeling, however, favored another picture, the “Waiting for the Verdict” of A. Solomon, and a good deal of discussion arose as to whether the prize had been rightly awarded. As one of the judges, and as a member of the Academy, Mr. Alfred Hunt addressed a letter on the matter to Mr. Ruskin, the main portion of whose reply was sent by him to the _Liverpool Albion_ and is now reprinted here. Mr. Solomon’s picture had been exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1857 (No. 562), and is mentioned in Mr. Ruskin’s Notes to the pictures of that year (p. 32).

[77] The defence was made in a second notice (March 6, 1858) of the Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy, then open to the public. The picture of Mr. Waller Paton (now R.S.A.) alluded to here was entitled “Wild Water, Inveruglass” (161); he also exhibited one of “Arrochar Road, Tarbet” (314). The platitudes of the _Scotsman_ against the pre-Raphaelites were contained in its second notice of the Exhibition (February 20, 1858).

[78] There must be some error here, as it is the _true_ dreams that come through the horn gate, while the fruitless ones pass through the gate of _ivory_. The allusion is to Homer (Odyssey, xix. 562).

[79] In illustration of the old Scottish ballad of “Burd Helen,” who, fearing her lover’s desertion, followed him, dressed as a foot-page, through flood, if not through fire--

“Lord John he rode, Burd Helen ran, The live-lang sumer’s day, Until they cam’ to Clyde’s Water, Was filled frae bank to brae.

“‘See’st thou yon water, Helen,’ quoth he, ‘That flows frae bank to brim?’ ‘I trust to God, Lord John,’ she said, ‘You ne’er will see me swim.’”

This picture (No. 141 in the Edinburgh Exhibition of 1858) was first exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1856. In the postscript to his Academy Notes of that year, Mr. Ruskin, after commenting on the “crying error of putting it nearly out of sight,” so that he had at first hardly noticed it, estimates this picture as second only to the “Autumn Leaves” of Mr. Millais in that exhibition. The following is a portion of his comment on it: “I see just enough of the figures to make me sure that the work is thoughtful and intense in the highest degree. The pressure of the girl’s hand on her side; her wild, firm, desolate look at the stream--she not raising her eyes as she makes her appeal, for fear of the greater mercilessness in the human look than in the glaze of the gliding water--the just choice of the type of the rider’s cruel face, and of the scene itself--so terrible in haggardness of rattling stones and ragged heath,--are all marks of the action of the very grandest imaginative power, shortened only of hold upon our feelings, because dealing with a subject too fearful to be for a moment believed true.”

The picture was originally purchased by Mr. John Miller, of Liverpool; at the sale of whose collection by Christie and Manson, two years later, in 1858, it fetched the price of two hundred guineas. At the same sale the “Blind Girl,” alluded to in the previous letter, was sold for three hundred.

For the poem illustrated by the picture, see Aytoun’s “Ballads of Scotland,” i. 219, where a slightly different version of it is given: it may also be found in “Percy’s Reliques” (vol. iii. p. 59), under the title of “Child Waters.” Other versions of this ballad, and other ballads of the same name, and probably origin, may be found in Jameson’s collection, vol. i. p. 117, vol. ii. p. 376, in Buchan’s “Ancient Ballads of the North,” ii. 29 (1879 ed.) and in “Four Books of Scottish Ballads,” Edin., 1868, Bk. ii. p. 21, where it is well noted that “Burd Helen” corresponds to the “Proud Elise” of northern minstrels, “La Prude Dame Elise” of the French, and the “Gentle Lady Elise” of the English--(Burd, Prud, Preux). It is also possible that it is a corruption of Burdalayn, or Burdalane, meaning an only child, a maiden, etc.

[80] The _Witness_ had objected to the “astonishing fondness” of the pre-Raphaelite school for “conceits,” instancing as typically far-fetched that in the picture of “Burd Helen,” where Lord John was represented “pulling to pieces a heart’s-ease,” as he crosses the stream.

[81] The first exhibition of Turner’s pictures after his death was opened at Marlborough House early in November, 1856, seven months subsequent to the final decision as to the proper distribution of the property, which was the subject of Turner’s will.

[82] See Rogers’ “Italy,” p. 29.

[83] William Hookham Carpenter, for many years Keeper of the prints and drawings at the British Museum. He died in 1866.

[84] Mr. Ruskin’s offer was accepted, and he eventually arranged the drawings, and, in particular, the four hundred now exhibited in one of the lower rooms of the National Gallery, and contained in the kind of cases above proposed, presented by Mr. Ruskin to the Gallery. Mr. Ruskin also printed, as promised, a descriptive and explanatory catalogue of a hundred of these four hundred drawings. (Catalogue of the Turner Sketches in the National Gallery. For private circulation.