DOI Heft:
No. 84 (March, 1900)
DOI Artikel:Cook, E. T.: Ruskin as artist and art critic
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19784#0095
Joint Ruskin
he was deficient in power of invention and design.
" I can no more write a story," he says, in
" Prreterita," "than compose a picture." At one
time, it may be interesting to state, Ruskin did
undertake to design a painted window. The
window in question is to be seen at the east end
of Gilbert Scott's church at Camberwell, but as it
stands it owes little to Ruskin's power of invention.
He handed over the work to his friend Edmund
Oldfield (afterwards of the British Museum), find-
ing his own powers of design inadequate to the
task. " I should have been more crushed," he
says, " by this result had I not been already in the
habit of feeling worsted in everything I tried of
original work." He had, in fact, by this time
arrived at the self-knowledge that his genius
lay in the direction of interpretation, rather
than of invention. Thirdly, Ruskin had no
skill in the representation of the human form,
and perhaps some lack of sympathy as a
critic with those artists and schools who have
made the beauty of that form, and especially of
the nude form, their chief pre-occupation. In the
last of Ruskin's Oxford lectures which I reported,
he enlarged on " the superiority of landscape to
figure painting." Landscape art, he argued, was
higher in aim and more difficult of attainment.
"The painting of landscape," he said, "requires
not only more industry, but far greater delicacy of
bodily sense and faculty than average figure paint-
ing. Any common sign-painter can paint the
landlord's likeness, and with a year or two's scrap-
ing of chalk at Kensington, any Cockney student
can be got to draw effectively enough for public
taste, a straddling gladiator or a curly-pated
Adonis. But to give the slightest resemblance
to, or notion of, such a piece of mountain,
wild-wood, or falling stream as these, in this little
leap of the Tees in Turner's drawing, needs an
eagle's keenness of eye, fineness of finger like
a trained violinist's, and patience and love like
Griselda's or Lady Jane Grey's." This passage,
like any other taken from Ruskin's voluminous
works, must be correlated, in order to obtain a
complete view of his standpoint, with others partly
contradictory of it; for all truth, as he says, is
many-sided. But my present point is only that
Ruskin himself showed no skill in painting the
human figure. I believe he sometimes roughed-in
some figures in his landscapes, but he generally
"THE ROCK OF ARONA" FROM "MODERN PAINTERS (George Allen)
82
BY JOHN RUSKIN
he was deficient in power of invention and design.
" I can no more write a story," he says, in
" Prreterita," "than compose a picture." At one
time, it may be interesting to state, Ruskin did
undertake to design a painted window. The
window in question is to be seen at the east end
of Gilbert Scott's church at Camberwell, but as it
stands it owes little to Ruskin's power of invention.
He handed over the work to his friend Edmund
Oldfield (afterwards of the British Museum), find-
ing his own powers of design inadequate to the
task. " I should have been more crushed," he
says, " by this result had I not been already in the
habit of feeling worsted in everything I tried of
original work." He had, in fact, by this time
arrived at the self-knowledge that his genius
lay in the direction of interpretation, rather
than of invention. Thirdly, Ruskin had no
skill in the representation of the human form,
and perhaps some lack of sympathy as a
critic with those artists and schools who have
made the beauty of that form, and especially of
the nude form, their chief pre-occupation. In the
last of Ruskin's Oxford lectures which I reported,
he enlarged on " the superiority of landscape to
figure painting." Landscape art, he argued, was
higher in aim and more difficult of attainment.
"The painting of landscape," he said, "requires
not only more industry, but far greater delicacy of
bodily sense and faculty than average figure paint-
ing. Any common sign-painter can paint the
landlord's likeness, and with a year or two's scrap-
ing of chalk at Kensington, any Cockney student
can be got to draw effectively enough for public
taste, a straddling gladiator or a curly-pated
Adonis. But to give the slightest resemblance
to, or notion of, such a piece of mountain,
wild-wood, or falling stream as these, in this little
leap of the Tees in Turner's drawing, needs an
eagle's keenness of eye, fineness of finger like
a trained violinist's, and patience and love like
Griselda's or Lady Jane Grey's." This passage,
like any other taken from Ruskin's voluminous
works, must be correlated, in order to obtain a
complete view of his standpoint, with others partly
contradictory of it; for all truth, as he says, is
many-sided. But my present point is only that
Ruskin himself showed no skill in painting the
human figure. I believe he sometimes roughed-in
some figures in his landscapes, but he generally
"THE ROCK OF ARONA" FROM "MODERN PAINTERS (George Allen)
82
BY JOHN RUSKIN