yours is the first sufficient notice which has been taken of the
important collection of sketches at Marlborough House, and as your
strictures on the arrangement proposed for the body of the collection,
as well as on some statements in my catalogue, are made with such candor
and good feeling, will you allow me to offer one or two observations in
reply to them? The mode of arrangement to which you refer as determined
on by the trustees has been adopted, not to discourage the study of the
drawings by the public, but to put all more completely at their service.
Drawings so small in size and so delicate in execution cannot be seen,
far less copied, when hung on walls. As now arranged, they can be put
into the hands of each visitor, or student, as a book is into those of a
reader; he may examine them in any light, or in any position, and copy
them at his ease. The students who work from drawings exhibited on walls
will, I am sure, bear willing witness to the greater convenience of the
new system. Four hundred drawings are already thus arranged for public
use; framed, and disposed in eighty portable boxes, each containing five
sketches, so that eighty students might at once be supplied with five
drawings apiece. The oil paintings at Marlborough House, comprising as
they do the most splendid works which Turner ever produced, and the 339
drawings exhibited beside them, are surely enough for the amusement of
loungers--for do you consider as anything better than loungers those
persons who do not care enough for the Turner drawings to be at the
trouble of applying for a ticket of admission, and entering their names
in a book--that is to say, who will not, to obtain the privilege of
quiet study of perfect art, take, once for all, as much trouble as would
be necessary to register a letter, or book, or parcel?
I entirely waive for the moment the question of exposure to light. I put
the whole issue on the ground of greatest public convenience. I believe
it to be better for the public to have two collections of Turner’s
drawings than one; nay, it seems to me just the perfection of all
privilege to have one gallery for quiet, another for disquiet; one into
which the curious, idle, or speculative may crowd on wet or weary days,
and another in which people desirous of either thinking or working
seriously may always find peace, light, and elbow-room. I believe,
therefore, that the present disposition of these drawings will be at
once the most convenient and the most just, even supposing that the
finest works of Turner would not be injured by constant exposure. But
that they would be so admits of no debate. It is not on my judgment nor
on any other unsupported opinion, that the trustees have acted, but in
consideration of facts now universally admitted by persons who have
charge of drawings. You will find that the officers both of the Louvre
and of the British Museum refuse to expose their best drawings or
missal-pages to light, in consequence of ascertained damage received by
such drawings as have been already exposed; and among the works of
Turner I am prepared to name an example in which, the frame having
protected a portion while the rest was exposed, the covered portion is
still rich and lovely in colors, while the exposed spaces are reduced in
some parts nearly to white paper, and the color in general to a dull
brown.
You allude to the contrary chance that some hues may be injured by
darkness. I believe that some colors are indeed liable to darken in
perpetual shade, but not while occasionally exposed to moderate light,
as these drawings will be in daily use; nor is any liability to injury,
even by perpetual shade, as yet demonstrable with respect to the Turner
drawings; on the contrary, those which now form the great body of the
national collection were never out of Turner’s house until his death,
and were all kept by him in tight bundles or in clasped books; and all
the drawings so kept are in magnificent preservation, appearing as if
they had just been executed, while every one of those which have been in
the possession of purchasers and exposed in frames are now faded in
proportion to the time and degree of their exposure; the lighter hues
disappearing, especially from the skies, so as sometimes to leave hardly
a trace of the cloud-forms. For instance, the great Yorkshire series is,
generally speaking, merely the wreck of what it once was.[89] That
water-colors are not injured by darkness is also sufficiently proved by
the exquisite preservation of missal paintings, when the books
containing them have been little used. Observe, then, you have simply
this question to put to the public: “Will you have your Turner drawings
to look at when you are at leisure, in a comfortable room, under such
limitations as will preserve them to you forever, or will you make an
amusing exhibition of them (_if_ amusing, which I doubt) for children
and nursery-maids; dry your wet coats by them, and shake off the dust
from your feet upon them, for a score or two of years, and then send
them to the waste-paper merchant?” That is the simple question; answer
it, for the public, as you think best.
Permit me to observe farther, that the small interest manifested in the
existing Turner collection at Marlborough House does not seem to justify
any further effort at exhibition. There are already more paintings and
drawings placed in those rooms than could be examined properly in years
of labor. But how placed? Thrust into dark corners, nailed on spare
spaces of shutters, backs of doors, and tottering elongations of
screens; hung with their faces to the light, or with their backs to the
light, or with their sides to the light so that it “rakes” them (I use
an excellent expression of Sir Charles Eastlake’s), throwing every
irregularity of surface into view as if they were maps in relief of hill
countries; hung, in fine, in every conceivable mode that can exhibit
their faults, or conceal their meaning, or degrade their beauty. Neither
Mr. Wornum nor I are answerable for this; we have both done the best we
could under the circumstances; the public are answerable for it, who
suffer such things without care and without remonstrance. If they want
to derive real advantage from the treasures they possess, let them show
some regard for them, and build, or at least express some desire to get
built, a proper gallery for them. I see no way at present out of the
embarrassments which exist respecting the disposition of the entire
national collection; but the Turner gallery was intended by Turner
himself to be a distinct one, and there is no reason why a noble
building should not be at once provided for it. Place the oil pictures
now at Marlborough House in beautiful rooms, each in a light fit and
sufficient for it, and all on a level with the eye; range them in
chronological order; place the sketches at present exhibited, also in
chronological order, in a lateral gallery; let illustrative engravings
and explanations be put in cases near them; furnish the room richly and
gracefully, as the Louvre is furnished, and I do not think the public
would any longer complain of not having enough to amuse them on rainy
days.
That we ought to do as much for our whole national collection is as
certain as that we shall not do it for many a year to come, nor until we
have wasted twice as much money as would do it nobly in vain experiments
on a mean scale. I have no immediate hope in this matter, else I might
perhaps ask you to let me occupy your columns with some repetition, in
other words (such repetition being apparently always needed in these
talking days), of what I have already stated in the Appendix to my Notes
on the oil-pictures[90] at Marlborough House. But I will only, being as
I say hopeless in the matter, ask you for room for a single sentence.
“If ever we come to understand that the function of a picture,
after all, with respect to mankind, is not merely to be bought, but
to be seen, it will follow that a picture which deserves a price
deserves a place; and that all paintings which are worth keeping,
are worth, also, the rent of so much wall as shall be necessary to
show them to the best advantage, and in the least fatiguing way for
the spectator.
“It would be interesting if we could obtain a return of the sum
which the English nation pays annually for park walls to inclose
game, stable walls to separate horses, and garden walls to ripen
peaches; and if we could compare this ascertained sum with what it
pays for walls to show its art upon.”
I ask you to reprint this, because the fact is that if either Mr. Wornum
at the National Gallery, or Mr. Carpenter at the British Museum, had as
much well-lighted wall at their disposal as most gentlemen’s gardeners
have, they could each furnish the public with art enough to keep them
gazing from one year’s end to another’s. Mr. Carpenter has already made
a gallant effort with some screens in a dark room; but in the National
Gallery, whatever mode of exhibition may be determined upon for the four
hundred framed drawings, the great mass of the Turner sketches (about
fifteen thousand, without counting mere color memoranda) must lie
packed in parcels in tin cases, simply for want of room to show them. It
is true that many of these are quite slight, and would be interesting to
none but artists. There are, however, upwards of five thousand sketches
in pencil outline,[91] which are just as interesting as those now
exhibited at Marlborough House; and which might be constantly exhibited,
like those, without any harm, if there were only walls to put them on.
I have already occupied much of your space. I do not say too much,
considering the importance of the subject, but[92] I must [with more
diffidence] ask you to allow me yet leave to reply to the objections you
make to two statements [and to one omission] in my Catalogue, as those
objections would otherwise diminish its usefulness. I have asserted that
in a given drawing (named as one of the chief in the series), Turner’s
pencil did not move over the thousandth of an inch without meaning; and
you charge this expression with extravagant hyperbole. On the contrary,
it is much within the truth, being merely a mathematically accurate
description of fairly good execution in either drawing or engraving. It
is only necessary to measure a piece of any ordinarily good work to
ascertain this. Take, for instance, Finden’s engraving at the 180th page
of Rogers’ poems,[93] in which the face of the figure, from the chin to
the top of the brow, occupies just a quarter of an inch, and the space
between the upper lip and chin as nearly as possible one-seventeenth of
an inch. The whole mouth occupies one-third of this space, say,
one-fiftieth of an inch; and within that space both the lips and the
much more difficult inner corner of the mouth are perfectly drawn and
rounded, with quite successful and sufficiently subtle expression. Any
artist will assure you, that in order to draw a mouth as well as this,
there must be more than twenty gradations of shade in the touches; that
is to say, in this case, gradations changing, with meaning, within less
than the thousandth of an inch.
But this is mere child’s play compared to the refinement of any
first-rate mechanical work, much more of brush or pencil drawing by a
master’s hand. In order at once to furnish you with authoritative
evidence on this point, I wrote to Mr. Kingsley, tutor of Sidney-Sussex
College, a friend to whom I always have recourse when I want to be
precisely right in any matter; for his great knowledge both of
mathematics and of natural science is joined, not only with singular
powers of delicate experimental manipulation, but with a keen
sensitiveness to beauty in art. His answer, in its final statement
respecting Turner’s work, is amazing even to me; and will, I should
think, be more so to your readers. Observe the successions of measured
and tested refinement; here is No. 1:
“The finest mechanical work that I know of is that done by Nobert
in the way of ruling lines. I have a series of lines ruled by him
on glass, giving actual scales from .000024 and .000016 of an inch,
perfectly correct to these places of decimals;{*} and he has
executed others as fine as .000012, though I do not know how far he
could repeat these last with accuracy.”
{*} That is to say, accurate in measures estimated in _millionths_
of inches.
This is No. 1, of precision. Mr. Kingsley proceeds to No. 2:
“But this is rude work compared to the accuracy necessary for the
construction of the object-glass of a microscope such as Rosse
turns out.”
I am sorry to omit the explanation which follows of the ten lenses
composing such a glass, “each of which must be exact in radius and in
surface, and all have their axes coincident;” but it would not be
intelligible without the figure by which it is illustrated, so I pass to
Mr. Kingsley’s No. 3:
“I am tolerably familiar,” he proceeds, “with the actual grinding
and polishing of lenses and specula, and have produced by my own
hands some by no means bad optical work; and I have copied no small
amount of Turner’s work, and I still look with awe at the combined
delicacy and precision of his hand; _it beats optical work out of
sight_.[95] In optical work, as in refined drawing, the hand goes
beyond the eye,{*} and one has to depend upon the feel; and when
one has once learned what a delicate affair touch is, one gets a
horror of all coarse work, and is ready to forgive any amount of
feebleness, sooner than the boldness which is akin to impudence. In
optics the distinction is easily seen when the work is put to
trial; but here too, as in drawing, it requires an educated eye to
tell the difference when the work is only moderately bad; but with
‘bold’ work nothing can be seen but distortion and fog, and I
heartily wish the same result would follow the same kind of
handling in drawing; but here, the boldness cheats the unlearned by
looking like the precision of the true man. It is very strange how
much better our ears are than our eyes in this country: if an
ignorant man were to be ‘bold’ with a violin, he would not get many
admirers, though his boldness was far below that of ninety-nine out
of a hundred drawings one sees.”
{*} In case any of your readers should question the use, in
drawing, of work too fine for the touches to be individually, I
quote a sentence from my “Elements of Drawing.”{**} “_All_ fine
coloring, like fine drawing, is delicate; so delicate, that if at
last you see the color you are putting on, you are putting on too
much. You ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone by
touches which are individually too pale to be seen.”
{**} See the “Elements of Drawing,” Letter III. on Color and
Composition, p. 232.
The words which I have italicized[96] in the above extract are those
which were surprising to me. I knew that Turner’s was as refined as any
optical work, but had no idea of its going beyond it. Mr. Kingsley’s
word “awe,” occurring just before, is, however, as I have often felt,
precisely the right one. When once we begin at all to understand the
work of any truly great executor, such as that of any of the three great
Venetians [(Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese)], Correggio, or Turner, the
awe of it is something greater than can be felt from the most stupendous
natural scenery. For the creation of such a system as a high human
intelligence, endowed with its ineffably perfect instruments of eye and
hand, is a far more appalling manifestation of Infinite Power than the
making either of seas or mountains. After this testimony to the
completion of Turner’s work, I need not at length defend myself from the
charge of hyperbole in the statement that, “as far as I know, the
galleries of Europe may be challenged to produce one sketch[97] that
shall equal the chalk study No. 45, or the feeblest of the memoranda in
the 71st and following frames;”[98] which memoranda, however, it should
have been observed, are stated at the forty-fourth page to be in some
respects “the grandest work in gray that he did in his life.”
For I believe that, as manipulators, none but the four men whom I have
just named (the three Venetians and Correggio) were equal to Turner;
and, as far as I know, none of these four men put their full strength
into sketches. But whether they did or not, my statement in the
Catalogue is limited by my own knowledge, and as far as I can trust that
knowledge: it is not an enthusiastic statement, but an entirely calm
and considered one. It may be a mistake, but it is not an hyperbole.
Lastly, you object that the drawings for the “_Liber Studiorum_” are not
included in my catalogue. They are not so, because I did not consider
them as, in a true sense, drawings at all; they are merely washes of
color laid roughly to guide the mezzotint engraver in his first process;
the drawing, properly so called, was all put in by Turner when he etched
the plates, or superadded by repeated touchings on the proofs. These
brown “guides,” for they are nothing more, are entirely unlike the
painter’s usual work, and in every way inferior to it; so that students
wishing to understand the composition of the “_Liber_” must always work
from the plates, and not from these first indications of purpose.[99] I
have put good impressions of two of the plates in the same room, in
order to show their superiority; and for the rest, thought it useless to
increase the bulk of the Catalogue by naming subjects which have been
published and well known these thirty years.[100]
Permit me, in conclusion, to thank you for drawing attention to the
subject of this great national collection; and, again asking your
indulgence for trespassing so far upon your space, to subscribe myself,
Very respectfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
[From “The Times,” October 21, 1859.]
_THE TURNER GALLERY AT KENSINGTON[101]_
_To the Editor of “The Times.”_
SIR: At the time of my departure for the Continent some months ago I had
heard it was proposed to light the Turner Gallery, at Kensington, with
gas; but I attached no importance to the rumor, feeling assured that a
commission would be appointed on the subject, and that its decision
would be adverse to the mode of exhibition suggested.
Such a commission has, I find, been appointed; and has, contrary to my
expectations, approved and confirmed the plan of lighting proposed.
It would be the merest presumption in me to expect weight to be attached
to any opinion of mine, opposed to that of any one of the gentlemen who
formed the commission; but as I was officially employed in some of the
operations connected with the arrangement of the Turner Gallery at
Marlborough House, and as it might therefore be supposed by the public
that I at least concurred in recommending the measures now taken for
exhibition of the Turner pictures in the evening, at Kensington, I must
beg your permission to state in your columns that I take no share in the
responsibility of lighting the pictures either of Reynolds or Turner
with gas; that, on the contrary, my experience would lead me to
apprehend serious injury to those pictures from such a measure; and that
it is with profound regret that I have heard of its adoption.
I specify the pictures of Reynolds and Turner, because the combinations
of equal coloring material employed by both these painters are various,
and to some extent unknown; and also because the body of their colors
shows peculiar liability to crack, and to detach itself from the canvas.
I am glad to be able to bear testimony to the fitness of the gallery at
Kensington, as far as could be expected under the circumstances, for the
exhibition of the Turner pictures by daylight, as well as to the
excellence of Mr. Wornum’s chronological arrangement of them in the
three principal rooms.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Oct._ 20.
P.S.--I wish the writer of the admirable and exhaustive letter which
appeared in your columns of yesterday on the subject of Mr. Scott’s
design for the Foreign Office would allow me to know his name.[102]
[From “The Daily Telegraph,” July 5, 1876.]
_TURNER’S DRAWINGS._
_To the Editor of “The Daily Telegraph.”_
SIR: I am very heartily glad to see the subject of Turner’s drawings
brought more definitely before the public in your remarks on the recent
debate[103] in Parliament. It is indeed highly desirable that these
drawings should be made more accessible, and I will answer your
reference to me by putting you in possession of all the facts which it
is needful that the public should know or take into consideration
respecting them, in either judging what has been hitherto done by those
entrusted with their care, or taking measures for obtaining greater
freedom in their use. Their _use_, I say, as distinguished from the mere
pleasure of seeing them. This pleasure, to the general public, is very
small indeed. You appear not to be aware that three hundred of the
finest examples, including all the originals of the Liber Studiorum,
were framed by myself, especially for the public, in the year 1858, and
have been exhibited every day, and all day long, ever since in London.
But the public never stops a moment in the room at Kensington where they
hang; and the damp, filth, and gas (under the former management of that
institution)[104] soiled their frames and warped the drawings, “by
friend remembered not.”
You have been also misinformed in supposing that “for some years these
aquarelles were unreservedly shown, and in all the fulness of daylight.”
Only the “Seine” series (rivers of France), the rivers of England, the
harbors of England, and the Rogers’ vignettes (about a hundred drawings
in all), were exhibited in the dark under-room of Marlborough House, and
a few larger and smaller examples scattered up and down in the room of
the National Gallery, including Fort Bard, Edinburgh, and Ivy
Bridge.[105] These drawings are all finished, most of them have been
engraved; they were shown as the choicest of the collection, and there
is no question but that they should always be perfectly accessible to
the public. There are no other finished drawings in the vast mass of the
remaining material for exhibition and means of education. But these are
_all_ the drawings which Turner made during his lifetime, in color,
chalk, pencil, and ink, for his own study or delight; that is to say,
pencil sketches to be counted by the thousand (how many thousands I
cannot safely so much as guess), and assuredly upwards of two thousand
colored studies, many of exquisite beauty; and all instructive as no
other water-color work ever was before, or has been since; besides the
ink and chalk studies for all his great Academy pictures.[106]
There are in this accumulation of drawings means of education in the
noblest principles of elementary art and in the most accomplished
science of color for every drawing-school in England, were they properly
distributed. Besides these, there are the three hundred chosen drawings
already named, now at Kensington, and about two hundred more of equal
value, now in the lower rooms of the National Gallery, which the
Trustees permitted me to choose out of the mass, and frame for general
service.
They are framed as I frame exercise-drawings at Oxford, for my own
schools. They are, when in use, perfectly secure from dust and all other
sources of injury; slide, when done with, into portable cabinets; are
never exposed to light, but when they are being really looked at; and
can be examined at his ease, measured, turned in whatever light he
likes, by every student or amateur who takes the smallest interest in
them. But it is necessary, for this mode of exhibition, that there
should be trustworthy persons in charge of the drawings, as of the MSS.
in the British Museum, and that there should be attendants in
observation, as in the Print Room of the Museum, that glasses may not be
broken, or drawings taken out of the frames.
Thus taken care of, and thus shown, the drawings may be a quite
priceless possession to the people of England for the next five
centuries; whereas those exhibited in the Manchester Exhibition were
virtually destroyed in that single summer.[107] There is not one of them
but is the mere wreck of what it was. I do not choose to name destroyed
drawings in the possession of others; but I will name the vignette of
the Plains of Troy in my own, which had half the sky baked out of it in
that fatal year, and the three drawings of Richmond (Yorkshire),
Egglestone Abbey, and Langharne Castle,[108] which have had by former
exposure to light their rose-colors entirely destroyed, and half of
their blues, leaving nothing safe but the brown.
I do not think it necessary to repeat my former statements respecting
the injurious power of light on certain pigments rapidly, and on all
eventually. The respective keepers of the Print Room and of the
Manuscripts in the British Museum are the proper persons to be consulted
on that matter, their experience being far larger than mine, and over
longer epochs. I will, however, myself undertake to show from my own
collection a water-color of the eleventh century absolutely as fresh as
when it was laid--having been guarded from light; and water-color burnt
by sunlight into a mere dirty stain on the paper, in a year, with the
matched piece from which it was cut beside it.