DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0144
132
JOHN RUSKIN.
and of the influence of a literary mind; Ruskin’s
work in these letters is artist’s work, designer’s and
painter’s work ; Ruskin is more sure of the world of
bodily vision, more obedient to all its limits—in a
word, more technical—than an ordinary drawing-master
in his class would know how to be. Ruskin teaches
his students to look at nature with simple eyes, to
trust sight as the sense of the painter, a sense to be
kept untampered with, unprompted, and unhampered.
In a book on Velasquez, published in the winter of
Ruskin’s death, by a critic who perhaps would not
have consented to quote a precept from Ruskin, nearly
a page is devoted to the record of what the writer had
been fortunate enough to hear said by a French painter;
and this proves to be but a long statement of what
Ruskin taught in a single phrase when he bade the
student to seek to recover the innocence of the eye.
And yet in spite of admirable theory, the frequently
recurring praises of William Hunt, the water-colour
painter of fruit, add to the reader’s uneasiness. On
the other hand, the student is taught to perceive the
greatness of the greatest masters.
“ You may look, with trust in their being always
right, at Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John
Bellini, and Velasquez. You may look with admira-
tion, admitting, however, question of right and wrong,
at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico,
Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt,
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern
pre-Raphaelites. ”
JOHN RUSKIN.
and of the influence of a literary mind; Ruskin’s
work in these letters is artist’s work, designer’s and
painter’s work ; Ruskin is more sure of the world of
bodily vision, more obedient to all its limits—in a
word, more technical—than an ordinary drawing-master
in his class would know how to be. Ruskin teaches
his students to look at nature with simple eyes, to
trust sight as the sense of the painter, a sense to be
kept untampered with, unprompted, and unhampered.
In a book on Velasquez, published in the winter of
Ruskin’s death, by a critic who perhaps would not
have consented to quote a precept from Ruskin, nearly
a page is devoted to the record of what the writer had
been fortunate enough to hear said by a French painter;
and this proves to be but a long statement of what
Ruskin taught in a single phrase when he bade the
student to seek to recover the innocence of the eye.
And yet in spite of admirable theory, the frequently
recurring praises of William Hunt, the water-colour
painter of fruit, add to the reader’s uneasiness. On
the other hand, the student is taught to perceive the
greatness of the greatest masters.
“ You may look, with trust in their being always
right, at Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John
Bellini, and Velasquez. You may look with admira-
tion, admitting, however, question of right and wrong,
at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico,
Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt,
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern
pre-Raphaelites. ”