_Guido_ (Eclectic-Bologna: 1575-1642). _See 11._
This and the companion picture (196) are interesting as being two of
the nation's conspicuously bad bargains. The purchase of them at very
high prices, £1680 and £1260, was indeed one of the grievances that
led to the Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1853, and to the
subsequent reconstitution of the Gallery. "Expert" witnesses declared
before the Committee that these two pictures ought not to have been
bought at any price or even accepted as a gift. Ruskin had some time
previously written to the _Times_ about them as follows:--
"Sir, if the canvases of Guido, lately introduced into the
Gallery, had been good works of even that bad master, which
they are not,--if they had been genuine and untouched works,
even though feeble, which they are not,--if, though false and
retouched remnants of a feeble and fallen school, they had been
endurably decent or elementarily instructive,--some conceivable
excuse might perhaps have been by ingenuity forged, and by
impudence uttered, for their introduction into a gallery where
we previously possessed two good Guidos (11 and 177) ... but
now, sir, what vestige of an apology remains for the cumbering
our walls with pictures that have no single virtue, no colour,
no drawing, no character, no history, no thought?" (_Arrows of
the Chace_, i. 64, 65).