Arrows of the Chace, vol. 1/2

ON THE PURCHASE OF PICTURES

Dear Sir: Your letter is deeply interesting to me, but what use is there in my telling you what to do? The mob won’t let you do it. It is fatally true that no one nowadays can appreciate pictures by the Old Masters! and that every one can understand Frith’s “Derby Day”—that is to say, everybody is interested in jockeys, harlots, mountebanks, and men about town; but nobody in saints, heroes, kings, or wise men—either from the east or west. What can you do? If your Committee is strong enough to carry such a resolution as the appointment of any singly responsible person, any well-informed gentleman of taste in your neighborhood, to buy for the Leicester public just what he would buy for himself—that is to say, himself and his family—children being the really most important of the untaught public—and to answer simply to all accusation—that is, a good and worthy piece of art (past or present, no matter which)—make the most and best you can of it. That method so long as tenable will be useful. I know of no other.

    Faithfully yours,
    J. Ruskin.[62 - This letter was written in reply to one requesting Mr. Ruskin’s views on the best means of forming a public Gallery at Leicester.]

III.

PRE-RAPHAELITISM

[From “The Times,” May 13, 1851.]

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BRETHREN

To the Editor of “The Times.”

Sir: Your usual liberality will, I trust, give a place in your columns to this expression of my regret that the tone of the critique which appeared in The Times of Wednesday last on the works of Mr. Millais and Mr. Hunt, now in the Royal Academy, should have been scornful as well as severe.[63 - 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.”]

I regret it, first, because the mere labor bestowed on those works, and their fidelity to a certain order of truth (labor and fidelity which are altogether indisputable), ought at once to have placed them above the level of mere contempt; and, secondly, because I believe these young artists to be at a most critical period of their career—at a turning-point, from which they may either sink into nothingness or rise to very real greatness; and I believe also, that whether they choose the upward or the downward path, may in no small degree depend upon the character of the criticism which their works have to sustain. I do not wish in any way to dispute or invalidate the general truth of your critique on the Royal Academy; nor am I surprised at the estimate which the writer formed of the pictures in question when rapidly compared with works of totally different style and aim; nay, when I first saw the chief picture by Millais in the Exhibition of last year,[64 - 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.] I had nearly come to the same conclusion myself. But I ask your permission, in justice to artists who have at least given much time and toil to their pictures, to institute some more serious inquiry into their merits and faults than your general notice of the Academy could possibly have admitted.

Let me state, in the first place, that I have no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very imperfect sympathy with them. No one who has met with any of my writings will suspect me of desiring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies.[65 - 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.] I am glad to see that Mr. Millais’ lady in blue[66 - 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 bloodTo 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.] is heartily tired of her painted window and idolatrous toilet table; and I have no particular respect for Mr. Collins’ lady in white, because her sympathies are limited by a dead wall, or divided between some gold fish and a tadpole—(the latter Mr. Collins may, perhaps, permit me to suggest en passant, as he is already half a frog, is rather too small for his age). But I happen to have a special acquaintance with the water plant, Alisma Plantago, among which the said gold fish are swimming; and as I never saw it so thoroughly or so well drawn, I must take leave to remonstrate with you, when you say sweepingly that these men “sacrifice truth as well as feeling to eccentricity.” For as a mere botanical study of the water-lily and Alisma, as well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.

But, before entering into such particulars, let me correct an impression which your article is likely to induce in most minds, and which is altogether false. These pre-Raphaelites (I cannot compliment them on common-sense in choice of a nom de guerre) do not desire nor pretend in any way to imitate antique painting as such. They know very little of ancient paintings who suppose the works of these young artists to resemble them.[67 - 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.”] As far as I can judge of their aim—for, as I said, I do not know the men themselves—the pre-Raphaelites intend to surrender no advantage which the knowledge or inventions of the present time can afford to their art. 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 desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture-making; and they have chosen their unfortunate though not inaccurate name because all artists 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 art has been in acknowledged decadence.