‘A N E W A N D N O B L E
S C H O O L’
:
R U S K I N A N D T H E
P R E - R A P H A E L I T E S
v Writings of 1863-77, mostly on Edward Burne-Jones.............
33. on the present state of modern art, with reference to the advisable arrangements of a national gallery 1867. . . . .
34. lectures on art 1870 The Relation of Ar t to Religion..........
35. lectures on l andscape 1871 (published 1897) III Colour .....
36. the eagle ’ s nest: ten lectures on the rel ation of natural s c i e n c e to a rt 1
The crucial role of John Ruskin (1819-1900) in assisting the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their immediate followers has never been in doubt. Claimed by Holman Hunt as an inspiration through his writing, he played no part in the establishment of the PRB and is hardly mentioned in the early pages of the journal kept by W
Brownings, he was not on their ‘List of Immor tals’ drawn up in 1848. In d e e d , h i s f
Everett Millais – came only in 1851, after he had been persuaded to write letters to The Times (12-13) in their suppor t. His first meetings with the other main protagonists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, seem not to have been before 1854, by which date the Brotherhood was, as described in Christina Rossetti’s poem of the previous year, “in its decadence.”
By then, however, Ruskin had allied himself to the Pre-Raphaelite cause, their determined stand against outdated establishment traditions affording impor tant parallels with his own æsthetic. Moder n Painters (1-11) – the book which impressed the young Holman Hunt – had been begun as a defence of J. M. W. Turner, and the apparent repetition of hostile criticism of intensely purposeful craftsmanship might have been enough in itself to engage his attention. Turner’s death in 1851 left Ruskin without a neglected genius to champion – even though the ar tist’s last work was not entirely to his taste – and he was able to frame an argument, satisfactory to himself at least, that the ideas and work of the group of young men echoed the artistic development o f h i s i d o l . T h
Turner as the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, reinforced his position, and their principles – again, posited as complementar y to Turner –formed the theme of the last of Ruskin’s first series of public lectures, also titled ‘Pre-Raphaelitism,’ (17) given in Edinburgh at the end of
1853. Despite misgivings about the choice of name, Ruskin sympathised w i t h t h e
Wr i t i n g t o h i s c o u s i n Ma r y Richardson in 1856, he expressed a simple belief in the study of ar t in the way in which it was studied before Raphael’s time; that is to say – looking to nature for tr uth only for models. After Raphael’s time, people made Raphael their model – not nature. The idea that the pre-Raphaelites imitated the defects of early masters is wholly absurd. They all paint far better than any of the men who exclaim against them – & imitate nature only. For full information on this subject, you may refer any enquirer to my pamphlet on “Pre-Raphaelitism”, which gives the principles of the ne w school: and my lecture at Edinburgh on Pre-Raphaelitism, which gives its histor y, as far as it is necessar y for most people to know it.
Both the method and intellectual principles of the ne w group appealed to Ruskin, especially as he seemed to see the young men (and women) taking note of ideas he had expressed. Close obser vation of nature; the choice of significant subjects from histor y and literature; and a religious purpose, or at least a strong sense of tr uth and morali t y – a l l t h
painting, and Ruskin made it par t of his mission to encourage, and even to represent them. The attempt to squee ze Millais into Turner’s mould – which had included the ill-fated stay at Glenfinlas in the summer of 1853, forcing the young painter to concentrate mind and hand on the meticulous background to the portrait commissioned by his father – may have failed, but in the exhibited paintings of the PreRaphaelite circle in the 1850s Ruskin could celebrate the movement ’ s gradual influence and ultimate success, not least through his own public commendation.
References to Millais, Hunt and Rossetti (whom Ruskin had not yet m e t ) a p
Ve
i
( 1 8 - 2 1 ) , published in 1853, and just at the time when Hunt had left England for purposeful exile in the Holy Land, Ruskin issued a masterly and convincing analysis of Hunt’s major paintings of 1854, The Light of the
World and The Awakening Conscience, in fur ther letters to The Times (14-15). These signal a closer personal involvement with the ar tists –he had seen work in progress on The Light of the World in Hunt’s studio – which reached its height during the years (1855-59) in which he issued his pamphlet commentaries on Royal Academy and other exhibitions, under the title Academy Notes (22-27). Cer tainly there must have been great enjoyment in taking on a largely hostile community of ar t critics, not least in seeing himself eventually vindicated, but there was also genuine conviction in applauding and encouraging what he saw as the emergence of a “ new and noble school.” Ruskin even joined the Hogar th Club, largely a Pre-Raphaelite coterie, and succumbed to William Michael Rossetti’s persuasion by allowing a watercolour of his own to be included in the Exhibition of British Ar t sent to America in 1858. He gave an impassioned speech in 1857 (30) during the testimonial campaign for Thomas Seddon, who had died early while emulating Hunt’s visit to the East, and wrote letters for the press in L i ve r p o
(31-32).
Ruskin’s direct patronage of artists was not always helpful, however, a s t h e l a n d s c a
discover, and the criticism of Brett’s Val d’Aosta in the final number of Academy Notes (26) could have proved disastrous to an ar tist with a thinner skin. In the second half of the decade, Ruskin cultivated an uneasy friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps relishing the oppor tunity to enjoy vicariously a pseudo-Bohemian lifestyle. He bought and commissioned watercolours of Dantesque subjects, recommending them in private correspondence to patrons such as Pauline Trevelyan and Ellen Heaton, but there was no public for um in which to promote his work, nor that of Elizabeth Siddall, whom he found even more enchanting, even considering her a “genius.” Only a fe w remarks on Rossetti, not entirely complimentar y – Ruskin considered his working methods “slovenly” – appear in the idiosyncratic but influe n t i a l d r a w i n g m a n u a l o f 1 8 5 7 , The Elements of Drawing ( 2 8 - 2 9 ) . Increasingly, his work seemed to Ruskin a dead end, even before it then took a completely wrong direction with female figures of the 1860s which Ruskin regarded as “ coarse ” . Ruskin had paid his respects to
Lizzie in her coffin in 1862, but the strain in the two men ’ s relationship is evident in the celebrated photographs of 1863 taken by William Downey at Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk.
With the last Academy Notes and the completion of Modern Painters in 1860, Ruskin’s main energies turned from the histor y and practice of ar t to issues of social and economic significance, beginning with t h e e s s a y s f o r m i n g Unto This Last , f i
Cor nhill Magazine, edited by W. M. Thackeray. He would only take centre stage in the world of ar t again nearly twenty years later, in the inauspicious circumstances of the libel suit brought against him in 1877 by James McNeill Whistler, following memorable defamator y remarks in Fors Clavigera (37). These were not gratuitous, however – there might even have been some degree of understanding between the two men if Ruskin had followed up the idea of a meeting suggested by Algernon Swinburne in 1865 – but were made in contrast to praise of the w o r k o f E d w a rd Bu r n e - Jo n e s i n t h
h e Grosvenor Galler y.
As his relations with Rossetti cooled, Ruskin had come to know William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who as Oxford undergraduates had responded eagerly to his writings, calling him “ a Luther of the ar ts ” in an ar ticle in the O xford and Cambridge Magazine for June 1856. A brief visit was even made to the Oxford Union in 1857, to see work under way on the famous Ar thurian wall paintings in the scheme co-ordinated by Rossetti, probably in the unfulfilled hope that t h e Pr e -
The Stones of Venice (18, 21).
Morris was always war y of being unduly influenced, and with independent means could afford to keep a respectful distance: there was l i m i t e d
Fo
yo
n g ‘ Ne d Jo
, ’ however, Ruskin was a godsend as patron and mentor in the early years e
, assisted by Ruskin, enabled him to see a wide range of work by Old Masters, including Venetian painters such as Tintoretto and Carpaccio (his own discover y). This marked Burne-Jones’s separation from the initial impetus that produced the Brotherhood, to the extent
that he was (and remains, ar t historically) a ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ only by association with Rossetti and his circle. Ruskin would have realised this, and in a lecture of 1867 on ‘ The Present State of Modern Ar t ’ (33) uses Burne-Jones’s work to illustrate a kind of restrained ‘dramatic’ ar t still as “noble or beautiful as … the classic school.” The two quarrelled over the merits of Michelangelo, anathema to Ruskin but loved by Burne-Jones (who once lay on the floor of the Sistine Chapel to examine the ceiling through binoculars), but the rift was not permanent. Ruskin would have found some of his former protégé’s paintings shown at the Grosvenor Galler y in 1877, such as The Mirror of Venus, unsatisfying in their lack of deeper meaning, but they provided a fixed point of excellence in contrast to Whistler’s Noctur nes, and he could praise them, in Fors Clavigera (37), as “simply the only ar t-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as “classic” in its kind, – the best that has been, or could be.”
As Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, Ruskin had free rein to lecture on any subject, and if the principles or achievements of Pre-Raphaelitism had still meant a lot to him, there would have been ample oppor tunity to say so. Instead, there are just three references in his early lectures, two of them (34, 36) harking back to his previous praise and continuing admiration for Hunt’s The Light of the World, “the most tr ue and useful piece of religious vision which realistic ar t has yet embodied.”
Only in 1878 did an oppor tunity arise to revive old memories, in c o n j u n c t i o n w
Jones. A visit to the Scottish countr y house of the Liberal M. P. and a
three varied works: Rossetti’s early Ecca Ancilla Domini! (1850), The Blind Girl (1856) by Millais, and a small watercolour by Burne-Jones, The King’s Wedding (1870). Partly stung into writing by a previous piece critical of his former protégé, he wrote two ar ticles for the magazine T h e Ni n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y u
d
t h e t i t l e “ T h e T h r e e C o l o u r s o f Pre-Raphaelitism” (38), treating these ver y different Pre-Raphaelite pictures almost as if they were works by Old Masters, coolly analysing t h e i r s t re n g t h s a n d we a k n e s s e s . At t h e c o re o f t h i s e s s a y, Ru s k i n i d e n t i f i e s t h e u n i f y i n g p r i n c i p l e w h i c h h a d r e m a i n e d c o n s t a n t
b e f o r e :
I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these three works, other wise so distinct in aim and execution. And this fraternal link he will, if careful in reflection, discover to be an effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or the power, things as they are or were, or may be, instead of, according to the practice of their instr uctors and the wishes of their public, things as they are not, never were, and never can be: this effort being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, a n d f
things as they are, than as they are not.
There is a passing comment in the Notes on an exhibition of Samuel Prout and William Henr y Hunt in 1879-80 (39) which mentions G. P. Boyce as well as John Brett –“all that affectionate and laborious painting from nature ” – and in an ever lingering comparison offered t o t h e Fre
book on The English School of Painting (43), Ruskin considered Turner “essentially a chiaroscurist, while the best pre-Raphaelite [sic] work is like so much coloured glass.” An invitation to contribute to the catal o g u e f
Some of the Principal Pictures of Sir John Everett Millais (44) produced a few faint echoes of Academy Notes acuity of obser vation, and allowed the ageing critic to demur from the sense that any of his former remarks had been “of any ser vice to the Pre-Raphaelite school,” while r
resented the idea of misjudging friends that I was either their precursor or their guide.” Ruskin’s autobiography Præterita (45) remained u
although it covers the first half of his life, there is barely a mention of his connection with the Pre-Raphaelites. It was hardly likely that he would have wanted to dwell on events leading up to the Glenfinl a s a f f a i r – h i s w i f e Ef f i e d o e s n
disappointing that only Rossetti is briefly recalled, in the context of the Working Men’s College, “doing the best he could, and teaching the best he could.”
There was still to be some significant comment, however, in Ruskin’s last productive years, in the form of the series of poignant lectures –effectively his last on ar t – on The Ar t of England (40-41), delivered at Oxford in 1883, at the end of his tenancy of the Slade Professorship, and published in the following year. Like many of his later lectures, they are ragged and strange but still contain powerful insights, as well as some touching reminders of how much he had enjoyed the company, and appreciated the work, of the young artists of the Brotherhood and their circle. Rossetti, who had died in 1882, he could call “ a much loved friend,” and although Holman Hunt might have bridled to be called “Rossetti’s disciple,” he would have known that such a friendship still existed, quite apart from the praise of paintings such as Strayed Sheep, The Scapegoat, The Light of the World and the still-to-be-completed Triumph of the Innocents. Burne-Jones is rather uncomfor tably paired w i t h G . F. Wa t t s , b
d imaginative designer – “his outline is the purest and quietest that is possible to the pencil” – even though there is an overriding sense that, as Ruskin would confess a fe w years later in his Notes on Millais, “ my love of Turner dims Mr. Burne-Jones’s pleasure in my praise.”
A caricature of 1904 by Max Beerbohm, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his back garden, cleverly encapsulates the world of Ruskin and the PreRaphaelites – Ruskin at one edge, a lesser figure of Whistler at the other (at the 1877 trial, most of the painters would have been on Whistler’s s i d e , l
adamantine and uncomprehending critic, to whom a depth of meani
conviction would always be more impor tant than either super ficial tr uth to nature or painterly technique. But without Ruskin, the PreRaphaelites might have found their path a great deal more difficult; conversely, without them Ruskin would not have enjoyed the feeling of being part of “ a new and noble school.” The Art of England lectures, his last significant pronouncements on art, may appear flawed, indeed almost pathetic in their backward-looking salute to a vanishing era
before myth and even realism succumbed to symbolism, æstheticism, and what would have been to Ruskin the simply incomprehensible idea of ar t for ar t ’ s sake. But they told of the pride and privilege that R u s k i n h a d f e l t i n k n o w i n g a n
, Hu
, M
, Rossetti and Burne-Jones. These were not just painters, but friends, the last even unto death: according to an anecdote recorded by his biographer W. G. Collingwood:
One night, going up to bed, [Ruskin] stopped to look long at the p h o t o g r a p h f r o m P h i l i p B u r n e - Jo n e s ’
‘ That’s my brother Ned,’ he said, nodding good-bye to the picture as he went. Next night the great ar tist died, and of all the many losses of these later years this one was the hardest to bear.
This is, in Burne-Jones’s own apposite phrase, a stor y “ too beautiful not to be tr ue. ”
Stephen Wildman, Ruskin Librar y and Research Centre Lancaster University October 2012
Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer... For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.1
It is quite possible that when Ruskin spoke these words in 1858 one of the contradictions he had in mind was that between his love of Tu r n
could be more different than the romantic, poetic canvasses of Turner, and the minute realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose works have all the hard-edged finish that Turner’s scumbled sur faces and idealised imager y lack? On the one hand is Turner, responding to the elemental forces of nature, or presenting mythological and literar y subjects that sum up and transcend the great academic tradition of historical landscape painting. On the other, are the works of a group of young artists who challenged the academic tradition that had shaped Turner’s career.
From Ruskin’s point of view, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites had important factors in common. To begin with, they were artists that other contemporar y critics had attacked. It is clear that from the 17-year-old Ruskin’s first defence of Turner onwards, Ruskin saw himself as a polemicist, a defender of the unjustly abused. In 1851, the year of Turner’s dying, the attacks on the Pre-Raphaelites presented a fresh challenge and, Ruskin hoped, an opportunity to shape a new generation.
Ruskin did not invent the Pre-Raphaelites, any more than he introduced the Gothic Revival. In both cases he inter vened in an already established development, and in both cases one of his motives was to steer the movement into explicitly Protestant paths. As is well known, the original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais, came together in 1848 in a spirit of camaraderie, driven by boredom with the institutionalized teaching of the Royal Academy Schools, and contempt for their senior contemporaries. As W. M. Rossetti, the leading critic and official Secretar y of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood described it:
The British School of Painting, as a school, was in 1848 wishy washy to the last degree; nothing imagined finely, nor descried keenly, n o r e xe c
y. T
. They hated the cant about Raphael and the Great Masters, for utter cant it was in the mouths of such underlings of the br ush as they saw all around them; and they determined to make a ne w star t on a firm basis.2
No n e o f t
shame at the status of the British School, and the reforming zeal expressed, is entirely in sympathy with the opinions of the 29-yearo l d R
Pre-Raphaelites’ heads, as a result of their use of what we would now call a brand name – the monogram PRB – to sign their pictures. This had gone unnoticed in 1849, when Rossetti first showed his Girlhood of the Virgin Mar y, but when its significance became known in 1850, this was seen as a provocation. Offence was taken especially by Frank Stone, a painter who doubled as art critic of the Athenæum, and, notor i o u s l y, b y C h a r l e s D i c k
. Tw
opprobrium: Holman Hunt’s A Conver ted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionar y from the Persecution of the Dr uids (which in fact has no PRB brand mark) and an untitled work by Millais that became known as The Carpenter’s Shop. There was no title, but there was an accompanying quotation from Zechariah in the Royal Academy catalogue: “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”.
The extent to which Ruskin at first did not like, indeed disapproved of the Pre-Raphaelites, is demonstrated by this painting. Ruskin later wrote: “My real introduction to the whole school was by Mr Dyce, R. A., who dragged me, literally, up to the Millais picture of The Carpenter’s Shop which I had passed disdainfully, and forced me to look for its merits”.3 The reason for this unexpected enthusiasm from a Royal Academician can be accounted for by William Dyce’s Anglo-Catholicism and to his own contacts with the Nazarene school during his visits t o Ro m e i n t h e 1 8 2 0 s . Ru
æsthetic grounds. When he finally turned on Millais in 1857, after he f e l t Mi
dwelling perpetually on the harshest lines of form, and most painful c
objects, which long ago, when they appeared in Millais’s picture of The Carpenter’s Shop, restrained the advance of Pre-Raphaelitism” (24). In fact it was Millais’s refusal to sweeten or soften the image of the boy Christ, the uncompromising linearity of the composition, the odd handling of recessional space and the lack of ærial perspective that makes it so distinctively Pre- or rather Anti-Raphaelite.
What Ruskin would have objected to most is not its un-Turnerian hard-edge naturalism, but the meaning of the painting’s symbolic programme. As Alastair Grieve has comprehensively demonstrated, the picture asserts a High Church, or Tractarian world-view. The fairly obvious typological prefiguration of the crucifixion in the pierced palm of the young Christ, the blood falling on his foot, the instr uments of the cr ucifixion hanging behind his head, should not distract us from subtler references that Ruskin, an ardent member of the opposing, Evangelical wing of the Church would have picked up.
The painting is believed to have been inspired by a sermon, probably by the High Churchman Edward Pusey, that Millais heard at Oxford in 1849, when he was close to members of the Oxford Movement, notably his patron Thomas Combe, Printer to the University. The water that Christ’s cousin John offers is a reference to the Tractarian emphasis on child baptism, and baptismal regeneration. The
penned sheep crowding the spaces at the rear left of the picture, held behind their barrier, are emblematic of the ordinar y members of the Church. This reflects the Tractarian belief in the necessar y separation of laity and the priests officiating at Christ’s table, while it was the Evang
pastoral symbolism can hardly have been lost on Ruskin, for in 1851 when he published his Evangelical appeal to the Protestant churches to unite against the threat of Romanism, which had been revived by the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850, when Rome decided to reins t a t e t h e C
pamphlet Notes on the Constr uction of Sheepfolds. One of the people t
’
none other than William Dyce, in his own Notes on Shepherds and Sheep. A Letter to John Ruskin Esq. M. A., of the same year.
This doctrinal difference with Millais’s picture was impor tant, but there is a curious unity in opposites that linked Millais and Ruskin even then. And that is the use of symbolism itself. The iconography deployed in the picture is hardly new, but we should ask the question of where Millais – who was cer tainly no intellectual – got the idea. At this date, 1850, there had been no direct contact between Ruskin and the PRB. In his account, written much later, W. M. Rossetti goes out of his way to stress Ruskin’s lack of influence at this time, writing that only Holman Hunt and possibly James Collinson “ up to 1848 or later read [Ruskin] at all”.4
But Millais’s fellow student at the Royal Academy school, William Ho l m a n Hu n t , m o s t d e c i d e d l y h a d , a n d i n h i s , t o s o m e e x t e n t competing version of the Pre-Raphaelite histor y, published in 1905, the reading of Modern Painters volumes one and two is a turning point, recalled with an almost suspicious vividness. Like a novelist, Hunt casts his account in the form of a first person, present tense conversation with his friend Millais who is painting away. The incident takes place in Febr uar y 1848: L a t e l y I h a d g r e a t d e l i g h t i n s k i m m i n g ov e r a c e r t a i n b o o k ,
Moder n Painters, by a writer calling himself an Oxford Graduate; it was lent me only for a few hours, but, by Jove! passages in it made
my hear t thrill. He feels the power and responsibility of ar t more than any author I have ever read. He describes pictures of the Venetian School in such a manner that you see them with your inner sight....5
Hunt then goes on to refer specifically to Ruskin’s famous passage in Moder n Painters II to where he describes Tintoretto’s Annunciation in the lower hall of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice:
The Virgin sits ... houseless, under the shelter of a palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the noise of the axe and the hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation.
T h e s p e c t a t o r t u r n s a w a y a t f i r s t , re vo l t e d , f ro m t h e c e n t re a object of the picture forced painfully and coarsely for ward, mass of shattered brickwork, with the plaster milde wed away from it, and the mor tar mouldering from its seams; and if he look again, either at this or the carpenter ’ s tools beneath it, will perhaps see, in one and the other, nothing more than such a study of scene as Tintoret could but too easily obtain among the r uins of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse explanation of the calling and condition of the husband of Mar y. But there is more meant than this. When he looks at the composition of the picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it depending on a narrow line of light, the edge of a carpenter ’ s square, which connects these unused tools with an object at the top of the brickwork, a white stone, four square, the corner stone of the old edifice, the base of its suppor ting column. This, I think explains the typical [ That is to say, typological] character of the whole. The r uined house is the Je wish dispensation; that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builder’s tools lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders refused is become the Headstone of the Corner.6
This passage is quoted at length because it is an impressive example of Ruskin’s prose, and of his application of Biblical typological analysis to visual iconography. Here is an example of Ruskinian fact
which also carries symbolic meaning – and it also shows why Ruskin should welcome some aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism so warmly, while limiting his praise for others.
Holman Hunt was so impressed by this passage that he cites it twice in his memoirs, quoting it in full in his second volume, when he recalls the moment in 1869 when he and Ruskin stood before the picture in the Scuola di San Rocco, while Ruskin read the passage aloud. There are a number of points to be made about this particular Pre-Raphaelite’s response to Ruskin. First, Ruskin’s personal discover y of early Italian ar t in 1845 and the re-shaping of Moder n Painters II in consequence, is par t of the general rediscover y in England of pre-Renaissance Italian ar t that forms the general intellectual background from which Pre-Raphaelitism, as a critique of formulaic, post-Raphaelite academic convention, emerged.
Secondly, notice how Ruskin emphasises the ugliness of the scene: “ The spectator turns away at first, revolted” – a curious anticipation of his response to the deliberate ugliness of Millais’s picture, which so offended Dickens with his description of Christ as “ a hideous, wr ynecked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown”. And thirdly, it is specifically carpenter ’ s tools that carr y such a weight of symbolism. Holman Hunt’s recommendation to Millais of Ruskin’s analysis of Tintoretto’s Annunciation may not have directly influenced Millais’s composition – that would be too glib, and anyway we have no independent confirmation the conversation actually took place. But there is a parallel understanding of the relation of the real to the symbolic, facilitated by the use of typological symbolism.
A s t o H o l m
programme of Pre-Raphaelitism, he told Ruskin in a letter in 1880: “All that the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood had of Ruskinism came from this reading of mine.” A prior intellectual influence or not, in the year following the furore over The Carpenter’s Shop, 1851, Ruskin made a decisive inter vention.
At the Royal Academy in 1851 Millais showed, among other works, T h e Wo o d m
Sylvia from Proteus. They and their Pre-Raphaelite brother Charles Allston Collins were once more attacked, notably by the critic of The
Times. Millais took the initiative. The Woodman’s Daughter is based on Coventr y Patmore’s dramatic poem of the same name. Millais kne w Patmore, who admired Millais’s work, and as a member of the contemp
which Patmore duly did. What may well have encouraged Millais to make this approach was the rumour, reported in W. M. Rossetti’s PreR aphaelite Jour nal t h
The Retur n of the Dove to the Ark was about to be bought by none other than Ruskin’s father, John James Ruskin. (In the event it had already been committed to Millais’s High Church patron, Thomas Combe.)
Ruskin’s inter vention took the form of two letters to The Times, published on 13 and 30 May, signed “ The Author of Modern Painters”. He followed this up with a long essay, published in pamphlet form under the title Pre-Raphaelitism, on 13 August 1851. In spite of its title, the pamphlet has a great deal more to do with Turner – whom Ruskin probably then knew to be dying – than with the Pre-Raphaelites, and his specific linkage of Turner and Millais has puzzled many people.
In his letters to The Times Ruskin’s defence of the Pre-Raphaelites is, to say the least, cautious, distributing praise and blame in equal propor tions. The first begins by citing two works, Millais’s Mariana and Charles Collins’s Convent Thoughts, which both use aspects of Thomas Combe’s Oxford garden in their compositions. Having stated his non-acquaintance with these ar tists, Ruskin immediately says he has “ no desire to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies. I am glad to see that Mr Millais’ lady in blue is hear tily tired of her painted window and her idolatrous toilet table; and I have n o p a r t i c u l a r re s p e c t f o r M r C o l l i n s ’ l a d y i n w h i t e , b e c a u s e h e r sympathies are limited by a dead wall, or divided between some fish and a tadpole” (12, p. 51).
This charge of Romanism obviously worried the Brotherhood, as we learn from W. M. Rossetti’s Pre-R aphaelite Jour nal, which records a proposal to write to The Times asser ting that these tendencies were “utterly non-existent”.7 Evidently such a letter was sent, for Ruskin refers to assurances that he was wrong in attributing these tendencies t o t h e Bro t h e r h o o d i n h i s s e c o n d l e t t e r t o The Times a f o r t n i g h t
later. We can forgive Ruskin his sectarianism (which he later regretted), and acknowledge that he was, by his own lights, right. James Collinson, a founder Brother, had already resigned from the PRB on the grounds that his membership was incompatible with the Catholicism to which he had conver ted, and for which he had begun to train f
should replace him, is a reminder that, as W. M. Rossetti records, the Brotherhood was already falling into desuetude when Ruskin took up its cause.
In terms of the cultural and religious politics of the period, where anti-Catholicism seems equivalent to the anti-Communism of the Mc C a r t h
oneself of suspicion if one was to move into the mainstream. As in the case of Ruskin’s inter vention in the Gothic Revival, he may have done something to steer Pre-Raphaelitism into more acceptable channels. But it cannot have been Ruskin’s influence alone. The antiCatholic fer vour aroused by the Papal Aggression of 1850 must have made Catholic sympathies much more controversial than in 1848, and we can see a number of adjustments taking place.
In 1851 Holman Hunt had read Ruskin’s Notes on the Constr uction of Sheepfolds while painting The Hireling Shepherd, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. This again uses pastoral imager y, but here suggests that the priesthood have been neglecting their flock while dallying with a girl whose scarlet dress is the colour of a Cardinal’s robes. When Rossetti sold his Ecce Ancilla Domini! of 1850 to the Belfast Protestant businessman Francis McCracken, he changed the title to the less Roman sounding The Annunciation, in order, as his brother put it, “ to guard against the imputation of ‘ poper y ’” . 8 The ambitious Millais made it absolutely clear where he stood in 1852 by exhibiting A Huguenot, on St Bar tholomew’s Day Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge. Millais was signalling that he was not even a Roman Catholic fellow traveller.
So what was it positive about the PRB that made Ruskin accede to Patmore’s request to inter vene? One aspect Ruskin immediately seized on was their adherence to fact. He might carp at Collins’s mariolatrous subject matter, but he also told The Times: “ as a mere botanical
study of the water lily and Alisma, as well of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine” (12, p. 52). But this adherence to fact w a s m o re t h
through the Pre-Raphaelite brand name straightaway:
They intend to return to early days in this one point only – that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they d e s i r e t o r
picture-making; and they have chosen their unfor tunate though not inaccurate name because all ar tists did this before Raphael’s time, and after Raphael’s time did not this, but sought to paint fair pictures, rather than represent stern facts; of which the consequence has been, that from Raphael’s time to this day, historical ar t has been in acknowledged decadence (12, p. 52).
It was this reforming zeal – similar to Ruskin’s own – that led him to declare in his second letter to The Times: “they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundations of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years ” (13, p. 56). Ruskin’s cultural nationalism was both ardent and sincere, but another motive can be suggested for his inter vention, which does not invalidate the others. In spite of Ruskin’s passionate advocacy of Turner, he had always had difficulties in his dealings with the much older man, who positively resisted his effor ts to promote and interpret him. This time Ruskin was now the established critic, and here was a group of young men whom he could defend and patronise in a way that Turner had never permitted. His first letter to The Times begins by citing the critic’s responsibility to give young artists guidance at a turning point in their career. Ruskin’s intervention undoubtedly helped to make this – it must be remembered – bright and unfamiliar ar t acceptable. Millais was elected as an Associate Royal Academician in 1853. Ru s k i
T h i
complicated things on a personal level, for he was not only looking for an expression by the ar tist of the moral and æsthetic values that
he wished to promote, he was also looking for friendship. His eagern e s s w
Millais fell in love with, and then ran off with, Ruskin’s wife Effie, he betrayed the tr ust Ruskin put in him, and it is to Ruskin’s credit that he continued to praise Millais’s work, until the ar tist betrayed his æsthetic principles as well as his personal ones.
As we have seen, the Pre-Raphaelite whose principles were most in sympathy with Ruskin’ s was Holman Hunt, but he left for Palestine at the beginning of 1854, and their friendship developed much later. Instead, Ruskin's affections were transferred to Rossetti, a ver y different artist to Millais. Later, Rossetti was succeeded by Burne-Jones. Only w i t h Bu r n
successful, and that is par tly due to Burne-Jones’s apparent calculation of his self-interest. The combination of financial patronage and critical suppor t was difficult to withstand – and resented when it was withheld. The Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner noted on receiving Ruskin's personal praise for his bust of Tennyson in 1857: “Now if he would only say this in print it would make my for tune ” . Ford Madox Brown’s dislike of Ruskin par tly derived from his silence on his work in print, although John James Ruskin did buy a charcoal study from him in 1857 for 10 guineas.
Rossetti’s dealings with Ruskin in the 1850s appear utterly cynical. While Ruskin’s money and the commissions that he arranged from others (plus an allowance of £150 a year to his mistress Elizabeth Siddall) spared Rossetti the potential humiliation of having to exhibit his work in public, Rossetti resented Ruskin’s well-meaning – though undoubtedly irritating – advice to regularise his domestic life. The tone of the relationship is set by Rossetti’s remarks on Ruskin’s first visit to his studio, which took place only in April 1854. At their first encounter, according to the ar tist George Price Boyce, Rossetti “thought Ruskin hideous”.9 However, as Rossetti told Ford Madox Brown, Ruskin seemed “in a mood to make my for tune ” . 10 He told Thomas Wooln e r, “A
favour of one ’ s work is of course sure to prove invaluable in a professional way ” . 11
Rossetti’s relationship with Ruskin eventually broke down – as did
most of his friendships – but during the 1850s Ruskin did find a companionship among ar tists. In July 1857 in a letter to Tennyson he went so far as to use the phrase “ we P.R.B.’s must do better for you ” . 12 He taught alongside Rossetti whom he recr uited to the staff of the London Working Men’s College. He became a member of the Hoga-
r t h C l u b, t h
1 8 5 8 a n d
Honorar y Member of the volunteer defence corps the Ar tists’ Rifles, formed in 1859 and joined by Rossetti, Morris, Holman Hunt, Swinburne and others.
Fro m 1 8 5 5 o n
ve
s i o n o f Pre - R
revie ws of selected works in the annual Royal Academy and other public exhibitions, known as Academy Notes (22-27). These covered a f a r b ro a d
Pre - R
c
,
,
cultural paradigm shift. The commitment to “ Truth to Nature” is not a dogma confined to Ruskin – the issue is, as always, what kind of “Nature” is it, to which the artist must be true? Periodically it is possible to obser ve a change in the perception of the external world, and t h e r e f o r e o f t h e “ Na
”
. R
k i n witnessed, indeed embodied, not one, but two paradigm shifts.
First there was the shift in perception from the ordered, harmonious, aristocratic world shaped by the classical conventions of Claude and Po u s s i n t o t h e t u r b u l
Turner. But that world, which like Turner’s career, was shaped by the Napoleonic wars, was replaced by another after the Reform Act of 1832, and the entr y into cultural power of a new class, the class that Ruskin h i m
Ruskin and Mar x were contemporaries.
A painting such as William Powell Frith’s Derby Day, the popular sensation of the 1856 R. A. exhibition, represents the splendours and miseries of the High Victorian world, realised in confident and readable detail. What Ruskin recognised about the Pre-Raphaelites was that for all their forays into the literar y sources of the past or the retrospective resonance of their name, these were modern painters. As he
stated in a footnote added to the fifth edition of Moder n Painters 1, issued in 1851: T h e p r
n e i t
e
pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavouring to paint, with the highest degree of completion, what they see in nature, without reference to conventional or established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any previous epoch (3, p. 39n).
Ho l m a n Hu n t ’
Ac
1
4 e xe m p l
i s n e w vision to an intense degree. It is called The Awakening Conscience, but it might be re-titled The Awakening Consciousness. It is difficult to think of an image, in the kindest sense of the word, more bourgeois than this. It is, to begin with, a bourgeois morality tale – one that can be read like a novel. The unmarried mistress of the wealthy young man is depicted at the moment when she realises the reality of her predicament, so while representing a situation shocking to the middle classes (as some critics were shocked), as with the popular newspapers of our own day, it justifies any pr urience by the possibility of redemption. It was painted in the ne w bourgeois suburb of St John’s Wood, in a villa rented for the purpose, and we cannot fail to notice, as Ruskin pointed out “the fatal ne wness ” of the furniture (15, p. 61). The hardedged realisation of every detail in the room represents a material world where ever y item – including the girl – can be possessed. There is no myster y, in a painterly sense, and a bailiff could put a price on ever y single item. Hunt – who was himself engaged in tr ying to educate his illiterate mistress who is the model in this picture – was par t of this world, even if his painting implies a critique of it. As Ruskin wrote o f t h i s p i c t u r e : “ T h e r e i s n o t a s i n g l e o b j e c t i n a l l t h a t r o o m –common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it may be) but it becomes tragical, if rightly read” (15, p. 61).
Yet there is an important distinction to be made between the apparent realism of Hunt’s painting and Frith’s Derby Day, a difference that lies at the hear t of Ruskin’s æsthetic principles. Both are narratives, inviting themselves to be “rightly read”. But whereas Frith’s narrative is on the surface – a hungr y young acrobat is distracted by a rich man ’ s
picnic for instance, or a yokel has lost his money – Hunt tells his stor y through what can only be described as “symbolic realism” – facts that, as with Ruskin’s reading of Turner and Tintoretto, carr y higher meanings. Looking at The Awakening Conscience, it may seem surprising to learn that Holman Hunt wrote that the Pre-Raphaelites “ were never realists.” But Hunt is here equating realism with naturalism, and Hunt’s realism carries something more. His comment continues: “I think ar t would have ceased to have the slightest interest for any of us had the object been only to make a representation elaborate or unelaborate, of a fact in nature ” . 13
Ruskin understood this, for it was his belief too. The most powerfully symbolic aspect of the painting is the glossy quiddity of the object itself. Within the picture there are also symbolic enactments of its meaning: the cruel cat and the bird beneath the table; the tangled web of the girl’s embroider y; the vulgar French clock bearing the figure of Chastity binding Cupid, the wall decoration depicting the fr uits of the ear th, corn and vine, preyed upon by greedy birds. Most striking of all, there is what has awakened the girl’s conscience. We see it in the mirror behind her head, a play on the idea of reflection that allows us to see what she can see directly: it is Nature, a tree in Spring blossom, reminding her of the innocence that she has lost. The reflection mirrors self-reflection.
It is admittedly, a bourgeois, back-garden Nature, but it is Nature none the less, and it is on the nature of this ne w Nature that Ruskin’s a p p
pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism Ruskin claimed that the Brotherhood had “carried out, to the ver y letter” his injunction to the young ar tists of England at the close of Moder n Painters 1:
They should go to nature in all singleness of hear t, and walk with her laboriously and tr ustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing. (1, p. 37)
resolved to paint his next picture “the whole out of doors, direct on
the canvas itself, with ever y detail I can see, and with the sunlight brightness of the day itself ” . 14 But Ruskin’s statement has been much misunderstood.
Ruskin had str uggled to free himself of the picturesque landscape tradition, exemplified by his drawing master Copley Fielding and the works by Samuel Prout and others collected by his father. Turner had demonstrated the limits of that formulaic vision, so that when Ruskin said that the Pre-Raphaelites “imitate no pictures”, he was saying, literally, that they were not “picturesque”. Both the foreground detail and the high horizon in Millais’s The Blind Girl of 1856, for instance, exemp l i f y Pr e - R a p h a e l i t e p r e c i s i o n . R u s k i n ’ s c l a i m i n t h e p r e f a c e t o
Pre-Raphaelitism appeared to find its justification, at least in retrospect, in the crisp landscapes of John Brett and John William Inchbold. The pamphlet was Brett’s introduction to Ruskin’s writings, and when the fourth volume of Modern Painters was published in April 1856, devoted to “Mountain Beauty” and culminating in the chapters ‘Mountain Gloom’ and ‘Mountain Glor y, ’ in his own words Brett “ r ushed off to Switzerland in obedience to a passion that possessed me ” . 15 Inchbold was similarly inspired to paint Mont Blanc, a picture now missing. Ruskin encouraged both these ar tists with critical praise and financial suppor t, and in 1858 spent time with both men when they were painting in the Alps. But Ruskin’s disappointment with the results, especially Brett’s Val d’Aosta, shows that what Ruskin wanted was a great deal more than a “representation elaborate or unelaborate, of a fact in nature ” . When Brett’s Val d’Aosta was shown at the Royal Academy in 1859 Ruskin praised its verisimilitude, but decided it was not a “noble picture . . . it seems to me wholly emotionless. I cannot find from it that the painter loved, or feared, anything in all that wonderful piece of world” (26, p. 204).
The reason for what must have been a cruelly disappointing verdict for Brett, can be found by reminding ourselves of two often overlooked aspects of Ruskin’s famous injunction to the young artists of England. The first is that when he made it in Moder n Painters 1, the injunction actually began: “ They should keep to quiet colours, greys and browns; and, making the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation, should go to Nature in all singleness
‘ A N E W A N D N O B L E S C H O O L I N E N G L A N D ’
of hear t... ” (3.623-4). Pre-Raphaelite realism may reflect a ne w mater i a l i s t w o r l d - v i e w, b u t Tu r n
transformative powers of the imagination are needed if the ar tist is to produce a “noble picture”. For in Modern Painters Ruskin’s injunction to reject nothing, select nothing and scorn nothing continues:
Then, when their memories are stored, and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show what their heads are made of. (1, p. 37)
Ruskin’s response to painters such as Brett and Inchbold showed that naturalism indeed was not enough.
With the exception of Holman Hunt, the moment of Pre-Raphaelite “symbolic realism” was short-lived. And when what one might call the “second generation” Pre-Raphaelites, notably Burne-Jones and William Morris, joined Rossetti in taking up the scarlet and the gold and giving rein to their fancy on the walls of the Oxford Union in 1857, Ruskin w a s a p
. T
medievalism that Ruskin deployed in The Stones of Venice and the romantic medievalism of Rossetti’s Before the Battle, which Ruskin described as “almost the worst thing he has ever done”. 16 Ruskin may have supported Elizabeth Siddall, and in a private letter even called her a “genius”, but he never praised her publicly.
In a letter to G. F. Watts in 1858 Ruskin wrote that he was “ answera
– n o t i n d
t h e s t i f f n e s s
a n d q u a i n t n e s s a n d i n t e n s i t y a s o p p o s e d t o c l a s s i c a l g r a c e a n d t r a n -
q u i l i t y – n ow I a m s u f f e r i n g f o r s o f a r y i e l d i n g t o m y ow n l i k i n g s –
I ’ ve g o t s i c k e n e d o f a l l Go t h i c by Ro s s e t t i’s c l i q u e ” . 17 T h e i m a g i n a -
t i ve t r a n s f o r m a t i o n re p re s e n t e d by t h i s k i n d o f m e d i e va l i s m i s t h e
o u t c o m e o f t h e “ m o r b i d t e n d e n c i e s ” Ru s k i n h a d h i n t e d a t i n h i s
s e c o n d l e t t e r i n d e f e n c e o f t h e Pre - R a p h a e l i t e s i n T h e Ti m e s i n 1 8 5 1 (13). Ruskin found them so repellent that after 1860 he virtually aban-
d o n s t h e Go t h i c .
It is evident that for Ruskin the “ new and noble school in England”
of the Pre-Raphaelites did not live up to its promise, and that his quest for a satisfactor y synthesis of visual veracity and imaginative tr uth continued. But let this introduction end with a return to the beginning, and that apparently paradoxical coupling of Millais and Turner. First of all, the link between them in his pamphlet Pre-R aphaelitism is one of dialectical difference, not similarity: “ They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points of ar t in both directions” (16, p. 81). Secondly, Ruskin believed that Millais and Turner “ are among the fe w men who have defied all false teaching, and have therefore, i n g re a t m e a s u re , d o n e j u s t i c e t o t h e g i f t s w i t h w h i c h t h e y we re entr usted” (16, p. 49).
We are back with the idea of an original vision, one that may see things differently, but sees them tr ue. And for once Ruskin was able to make a critical synthesis of these utterly different visions – by using his power as a patron, and commissioning Millais to paint his own por trait. As Ruskin wrote to his father on 6 July 1853: “ We shall have the two most wonder ful torrents in the world, Turner’s St Gothard and Millais’s Glenfinlas”. The rocks and rushing water amongst which Ruskin stands evoke the geology of mountains, in Ruskin’s mind a background utterly Turnerian. But the subject is modern, and the treatment Pre-Raphaelite: a closely delineated figure in a confined space. (In terms of what I have described as “symbolic realism”, the r ushing waters may suggest the torrents of Ruskin’s fluid mind.) In the lectures
t h a t h
“Ever y Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person ” (17, p. 127).
Millais did not agree with Ruskin about Turner, but by getting Millais t o e x p l o re a t
hoped that a revolution in landscape painting would follow. In terms of the new world-view offered by the best of the Pre-Raphaelites, and n o t w i t h
In
, arguably, it did. For as Ruskin put it:
I wish it to be understood how ever y great man paints what he
intense sense of fact. And thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the tr uths around them as they appeared to each man ’ s own mind, not as he had been taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them (16, p. 99).
Rober t He wison
London, October 2012
Revised from a lecture given as Slade Professor of Fine Ar t, Oxford University, in Febr uar y 2000
REFERENCES
1 Library Edition, vol 16, p 187
2. (Rossetti 1895 1.126).
3 Library Edition, vol 37, p 427-8
4. (Rossetti 1895 1.137)
5 Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2 volumes, 1905) vol 1, p. 90
6. Library Edition, vol. 4, p. 264-5
7 (PRBJ 94)
8. (PRBJ.99)
9 (Boyce 13)
10. (Doughty & Wall 1.185)
11. (Woolner.52)
12 Library Edition, vol 36, p 265
13. Holman Hunt, op. cit. vol 1, p. 150
14 Holman Hunt, op cit vol 1, p 91
15. (Parris/Tate PRB.147)
16 (LN 55)
17 (Chapman 153)
EDITORIAL NOTE
This is a compilation of all of Ruskin’s published w r i t i n g s re l a t i n g t o t h e Pre - R a p h a e l i t e s , b u t does not include diary entries or personal letters, w h e t h e r p
else where.
The authoritative edition of Ruskin’s writings is The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 39 vols., 1903-12), known as the Librar y Edition. Cook and Wedderburn corrected the text mainly in order to offer a consistency in grammar and punctuation throughout Ruskin’s writing. In this compilation, the form of first publication has been restored wherever possible, to give the text as it originally appeared, including all inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names as well as in punctuation and grammar.
T h e L
through the website of the Ruskin Librar y and Research Centre, Lancaster University: http:// www.lancs.ac.uk/users/r uskinlib/Pages/Works. html
The passage in Ruskin’s writing most associated with the Pre-R aphaelites was published five years before the formation of the Brotherhood. His first book, Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-60), developed out of a passionate sense of injustice at the abusive criticism of paintings by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) shown at the Royal Academy in the 1830s and early 1840s. A description of Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842, Tate) as looking like “ a mass of soapsuds and whitewash” epitomised the bafflement of many critics at the impressionistic effects of light and atmosphere Tur ner was achieving.
The young Ruskin, already an admirer of Turner’s work, drafted a rebuttal which was sent to the artist for comment but returned without positive approval. Encouraged by his father, who bought a first Turner watercolour in Januar y 1839 (Richmond Hill and Bridge, Surrey, c.1831; British Museum), he began a more considered defence, but with the provocative title of Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Ar t of Landscape Painting to the Ancient Masters. The first volume, credited only as being ‘By a Graduate of Oxford’, was published in May 1843, when Ruskin was twenty-four. While including other contemporar y ar tists – chiefly landscape painters such as Clarkson Stanfield, Samuel Prout and David Cox (all of whom figured in the Ruskins’ collection of watercolours) – the gist
regarded as equal, if not superior, to the Old Masters: it therefore stands as the first significant book of moder n ar t histor y, and the first about moder n British ar t.
At the end of Volume 1, as par t of its Conclusion, Ruskin calls Tur ner “the only man who has ever given an entire transcript of the whole system of nature, and is, in this point of view, the only per fect landscape painter whom the world has ever seen. ” He then issues a call to young ar tists to
emulate Tur ner – not in tr ying to imitate his mature work, but in pursuing what Ruskin saw as a lifetime’s study of nature, grounded in close observation and study. The important insistence on “making the early works of Tur ner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation” is often omitted from the quotation of what follows in the same sentence, the call to “ go to Nature in all singleness of hear t … ” , after which the young ar tist can then, as Ruskin argues that Tur ner had done, “take up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of.”
1 modern painters volume i (1843) part ii, section vi, chapter iii conclusion. – modern art and modern criticism
§20. Brilliancy of e xecution or effor ts at invention not to be tolerated in young ar tists. From young ar tists, in landscape nothing ought to be tolerated but simple bona fide imitation of nature. They have no business to ape the execution of masters; to utter weak and disjointed repetitions of other men ’ s words, and mime the gestures of the preacher, without understanding his meaning or sharing in his emotions. We do not want their cr ude ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their unsystematized experiments upon the Sublime. We scorn their velocity; for it is without direction: we reject their decision; for it is without grounds: we contemn their composition; for it i s w i t h o u t m a t e r i a l s : we re p ro b a t e t h e i r c h o i c e ; f o r i t i s w i t h o u t comparison. Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalize; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of Nature, and tracing the finger of God. Nothing is so bad a symptom, in the work of young ar tists, as too much dexterity of handling; for it is a sign that they are satisfied with their work, and have tried to do nothing more than they were able to do.
§21. The duty and after privileges of all students. Their work should be full of failures; for these are the signs of effor ts. They should keep to quiet colours, greys and browns; and, making
the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation, should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instr uction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth. Then, w
their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of. We will follow them wherever they choose to lead; we will check at nothing; they are then our masters, and are fit to be so. They have placed themselves above our criticism, and we will listen to their words, in all faith and humility; but not unless they themselves have bowed before, in the same submission, to a higher Authority and Master.
In his autobiographical memoir Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (two volumes, 1905), William Holman Hunt described his discover y of Modern Painters (borrowed through a fellow student from Cardinal Wiseman, and devoured overnight), and how he felt that “of all its readers none could have felt more strongly than myself that it was written expressly for him.” The likelihood is that his enthusiasm for it would h a ve b e e
however, when asked to read the work, resolutely refused to do so, saying he had his own ideas, and, convinced of their absolute soundness, he should carr y them out regardless of what any man might say. ”
Hunt may well have been reading the second edition, published in 1844; the third (1848) was substantially revised, and in the fifth (1851) – the first to carr y Ruskin’s name as author – two footnotes were added which reveal an awareness of the Brotherhood and some of the early exhibited landscapes. Expanding a section in ‘ The Tr uth of Vegetation’, Ruskin gives qualified praise to their treatment of foliage, while scor ning an “unfor tunately” chosen name – “I hear tily wish they would be content to paint well without calling themselves names. ” Millais (1829-1896) and Hunt (1827-1910) are singled out for individual comment in a second note, in the Conclusion: again Ruskin queries the usefulness of the name – their principles