Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.
Edward Burne-Jones, The Perseus Series: Perseus and the Sea Nymphs (The Armament of Perseus), 1877.
Gouache on paper, 152.8 × 126.4 cm.
Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.
The young painter read the book from cover to cover, hoping that before falling asleep he would find what he had been seeking for so long; a call to arms against academic generalisation and a superior model that could be opposed to the academic models. Finally, he came upon this page, the last in the volume and, at the time, the most audacious that had ever been written: “From young artists 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 mimic the gestures of the preacher without understanding his meaning or sharing in his emotions. We do not want their crude ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their unsystematised experiments upon the Sublime. We scorn their velocity, for it is without direction; we reject their decision, for it is without grounds; we re-probate their choice, for it is without comparison. Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalise; 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 artists 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. Their work should be full of failures, for these are the signs of efforts. 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 instruction rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.”[9] The call to arms had been found.
Who, then, was the writer who, on this page written in 1843, gave the precise formula for realism well before the realists, at the time when Courbet and those like him were still children or barely out of school, still struggling to find their way? He, too, was almost a child. He had written this book when he was but twenty-three years old in a small house in Herne Hill, in the Surrey hills outside London. He had spent several years travelling with his parents in Italy and along the banks of the Rhine in Switzerland, amassing documents, copying paintings, studying leaves and flowers under a microscope, running through the museums and mountains with pencil in hand, sketching the mouldings of a cornice or the grand lines of a glacier. Then, determined to express his admiration for Turner and praise this great artist, he made use of all of his observations and all these examples, and cried out to a stupefied England that nothing in the world was more beautiful than nature and art, and that a great people that expressed itself could became artists whenever they wanted. The product of all this was the first volume of Modern Painters. Then, over the next five years, he wrote those prodigious evocations of human monuments and divine things, of ancient thought and vanished inspiration: The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Aratra Pentelici, The Val d’Arno, Sesame and Lilies, The Queen of the Air, The Eagle’s Nest, Ariadne Florentina, Mornings in Florence, and Laws of Fesole.
John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1893.
Oil on canvas, 112 × 81 cm.
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.
William Holman Hunt, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851.
Oil on canvas, 98.5 × 133.3 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
In these works, this authoritative guide, this sovereign of aesthetics committed himself to curing art of bad taste, but on condition of blind obedience; these works so full of analytic acuity and creativity that one could call them poems of art criticism.[10] John Ruskin (for it was he) delighted the English imagination for forty years with his appreciation of the heavens, clouds, woods, waters and rocks, and raised his country progressively to his level of enthusiasm, whose ridiculous but very sincere expression was aestheticism. Understanding from the outset that his compatriots would not understand if he spoke to them of nature and art only in terms of beauty, he spoke to them of truth and goodness, of usefulness, morals, biblical thought, and the curiosities of science. Though he had a single goal, he used many different approaches. He was by turns a scholar, an historian, an anti-papist, an economic moralist, a poet, a botanist and a geologist, and through his charming and learned discourse he attracted even the most resistant Englishmen to the idea of beauty. All of the winding paths in his historical promenade brought them inevitably to the same point, which was the social mission of art and its supremacy over all other things. This is the man who would protest against railways because they were ugly, who would forgive popes because they loved beauty, who would found aesthetic festivals in convents and museums in working-class neighbourhoods, and who would resurrect the guilds of the Middle Ages because they were picturesque. He would create a workshop in Westmoreland with thirty women working on spinning wheels modelled after those of the Campanile de Giotto, and a workshop in Laxey on the Isle of Man where the black wool from the island’s sheep was woven without the help of any modern machine, because manual work developed the muscles and made the human body more beautiful. Examples of Ruskin’s aesthetic despotism and the submission of his admirers are known throughout England. One day, the great aesthetician declared that he did not understand why apple trees in bloom were never depicted in paintings, since nothing was more “aesthetic” than a blooming apple tree. The following year, the walls of the exhibitions and galleries were covered with apple trees in bloom. Another time, a woman was filled with the desire to copy nature and asked him for advice in choosing a model. “I will send it to you,” he responded, and a short while later she found a cart at her doorstep containing an enormous paving stone. She was not astonished, and began meticulously studying this stone.
Arthur Hughes, The Knight of the Sun, undated.
Oil on panel, 28 × 39 cm.
Private Collection.
Besides this anecdote, there are many other examples of the punctuality with which the prescriptions of this sovereign of aesthetics were followed. Indeed, a tourist who follows the injunctions of Mornings in Florence when visiting the city of Savonarola could leave the banks of the Arno having seen neither the Tribune, nor the Palazzo Pitti, nor the Palazzo Vecchio, nor the Loggia, nor San Marco, nor most of the other things for which one generally visits Florence. But he will have shivered behind the funerary monument of the marquise Strozzi Ridolfi in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, and ruined his eyesight in a dark chapel of Santa Croce, and it would be a miracle if, while contemplating the Campanile from all directions, exposed to the air with his feet in the mud, he didn’t get a stiff neck. Now, these aesthetic stations were shown to around thirty English men and women, for six days in a row, in the order prescribed by Ruskin. These aesthetes could be found peering at the rays of sunlight in the Bardi chapel in front of Giotto as prescribed in Book III, and scrutinising the narrow door in the fresco The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They were seen running from Santa Maria Novella to the Uffizi at a quarter past eleven, just as Ruskin desired, and hurrying from the Duomo to the Spanish Chapel’s Chiostro Verde in order to compare the effects of the vaults, without losing a moment looking right or left down the street that they were crossing to avoid weakening the impression on the eyes. Finally, they were seen at the tombstone of Galileo Galilei, at the entrance of Santa Croce. And in the solemn shadow of the temple, listening to the profound and eloquent words of this great admirer of beauty, one experiences a striking sensation. One forgets that this visit is part of an immutable Cook’s tour. The magic of the great writer makes it again possible to see these