In our last Post, we considered some of Ruskin’s well-known statements about art and its crucial role in enhancing our lives. Although those passages are perfectly fine and challenging in their various ways, they were hardly the only expostulations on this subject to which he devoted most of his adult life. And so today, with little preamble, I offer for your reflection and cogitation a few more assertions uttered by our great thinker on this vitally important subject. Among them are some of his most well-known (and sometimes controversial) views. including, at Post’s end, his definition of “an Artist,” of which he was one, as we know, more than occasionally, and which, not a few regular readers of these missives in cyberspace are themselves. I invite your responses.
The first comes from one of his Oxford lectures of the 1870s:
Let me, with all distinctness possible to me, state [art’s] main business: it is to provide some service in the actual uses of daily life. You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its main business. It is indeed so, however. The giving of brightness to a picture is much, but the giving of brightness to life is more. And remember, were it only patterns, you cannot, without the realities have the pictures! You cannot have a landscape by Turner without a country for him to paint; you cannot have a portrait by Titian without a man to be portrayed. I need not prove that to you I suppose in these short terms; but in any event I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of all art is in getting the country clean and its people beautiful.
From The Two Paths, 1859 (his capitalization):
FINE ART Is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
Also from The Two Paths:
All art worthy of the name is energy neither of the human body alone nor of the human soul alone, but of both United, one guiding the other: good craftsmanship and work of the fingers joined joined with good emotion.
From The Elements of Drawing (1857):
[When creating art] we must take care to be right whatever the cost of pains. And then– gradually–we will find that we can be right with freedom.
From: Lectures in Architecture and Painting:
All noble ornamentation is perpetually varied ornamentation, and the moment you find ornamentation unchanging, you may know that it is of a degraded kind or degraded school.
from The Queen of the Air (1869)
I will not [defend] my general principle against what you perfectly well [will brook no] contradiction – that [something] may be painted very like, yet painted ill. Rest content with knowing that it must be like, if it is painted well; and take this further as general law: imitation is like charity. When it is done for love, is lovely; when it id one is done for show, it is hateful.
From Lectures on Architecture and Painting:
I have given 15 years of my life to ascertain that Turner, of whom you have known so little while he was living among you, will one day take his place beside Shakespeare and Verulam in the house of the lights of England. Yes, Shakespeare and Verulam! There is a third star in that central constellation around which, in the astronomy of intellect, all other stars make their circuit. By Shakespeare humanity was unsealed to you; by Verulam, the principles of nature; and by Turner, their aspect. All these giants were sent to unlock one of the gates of light, and unlock it for the first time. But of all the three, though not the greatest, Turner was the most unprecedented in his work. Bacon did what Aristotle had attempted; Shakespeare did perfectly what Aeschylus did partially. But not before Turner had the veil been lifted from the face of nature; the majesty of the hills and forests had received no interpretation, and the clouds passed unrecorded from the face of the heaven which they adorn, and the earth to which they ministered.
And, lasthy, as promised, his Definition of an Artist, from Fors Clavigera . Letter 59. November, 1875 (his capitalization):
An Artist is A PERSON WHO HAS SUBMITTED IN HIS WORK TO A LAW WHICH IT WAS PAINFUL TO OBEY THAT HE MAY BESTOW IN HIS WORK A DELIGHT WHICH IT IS GRACIOUS TO BESTOW.
Titian: Self- Portrait
Ruskin, “Dawn, at Coniston” (watercolor, 1873)
Until next time; please do continue well out there!
🙂
Jim
whyruskin.wordpress.com 