The Lamp of Memory
Chamonix: Summer 1842
John’s fingers were cramping and his cuff spotted with ink. His hand could not keep up with his thoughts, and his anger outstripped them both. Two days ago, in Geneva, he and his father had opened the thick parcel of English newspapers that had been forwarded to them. His father addressed the political and commercial news; his mother did not look at papers.
John turned first to the literary features and reviews, read a series of indifferent poems, and then found the review detailing a few of the offerings on view at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Turner was being excoriated. Turner had five paintings in the exhibition this year, and John had spent long hours before three of them. He took up another newspaper. No mention of the exhibition. A third discussed Turner’s entries in damning terms. The fourth was worst of all, a few lines dismissing the old artist as either half-blind or half-crocked. Turner’s colours were outrageous. He was accused of smearing his canvas with cream, chocolate, yolk of egg, and currant-jelly. At times the subject of the painting itself––though attached to laughably long and descriptive titles–– was indecipherable, lost in a swirling maelstrom of brushwork. His recent work was not True to Nature.
It had been Sunday; and twenty-two year old John Ruskin could do nothing but kneel during the evening Protestant service and pray to God to aid him in what he was about to undertake. They removed to Chamonix next day, to an inn with views to Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi. John felt a reverential appropriateness in this majestic setting for his task. By Tuesday morning at four a.m. he was seated at the wobbly desk in his room, looking across the still-dark valley at the ghostly peaks. Shaking his hands out before he took up his pen, he recalled his physical response when he stood before a fine Turner: a warming in the core of his being, every sense thrummingly alive. He would write a fitting defence of the greatest of landscape painters. He envisaged a pamphlet of some four or five thousand words; it would be finished by eight that morning.
By breakfast, writing as rapidly as his quills would allow, he had not even one sentence each on the points he felt he must touch upon. The viciousness and vapidity of the press, and the impressionability of its readers infuriated him.
Why do you blame Turner because he dazzles you? Does not the falsehood rest with those who do not?
He wrote every morning beginning at dawn, stopped upon his mountain hikes to jot down thoughts, excused himself early from table at night. The torrent of words continued. He understood, and must convey, that the greatness of Turner’s genius stood predicate on elemental ideas, ideas of truth, of beauty, of relation––and he would provide demonstrations of these ideas that, once understood, would stand as authoritatively as Euclidian proofs.
He must discuss the ways in which the ancient painters had shown water, hills, trees and sky, and look at the efforts of artists as varied in approach and result as Poussin and Vandevelde, Titian, Gorgione, and Claude. All major and many minor English landscape artists must be examined, held up to the light, their excellencies noted, and their inferiority to Turner explained.
But the vastness of his undertaking began to reveal itself to John. Everything is interconnected, he saw. He could not critique the depiction of mountains without discussing their actual geologic structure. To consider the painting of clouds without an examination of their formation and behaviour in the sky was impossible. The majority of people had looked at the natural world, but few had seen. Turner saw, and of all men living or dead came closest to the truth of God’s magnificent creation. John realised that looking at a good painting was a religious act, and that the greatest works of Turner were themselves prayers.
The greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest numbers of the greatest ideas.
Turner had never sacrificed a greater truth to a lesser, John saw; Turner’s latest works, if they had fault at all, were the embodied passion of one who feels too much, knows too much. He did not know how he recognised this in the man, or what mirror he had found to hold to his own face and glimpse the same truth about himself.
He wrote all the way through the tour, thought all the way down the Rhine, spent hours gazing into the churning water or up to the castle-rimmed cliffs. He told no one but his father of his efforts, or his aims. For the first time on their annual tour he was eager to return home, free from the distractions of scenery and disruptions of travel.
But first there was the imposition of the removal from Herne Hill. John James Ruskin had in the spring bought the lease of a far grander Georgian house, and when the family returned to the south London suburbs, they and cousin Mary Richardson decamped with the servants to Denmark Hill.
“You’ll have no hesitation in inviting your Christ Church friends there,” John James Ruskin had told John when obtaining the place. Unbeknownst to his wife and son he had been looking about for almost two years for a large, solid, and quiet property, one which reflected both his mounting prosperity and dislike of fashion. “And your mother will have more staff to order about.”
There were very few of his Oxford acquaintances John wished ever to see again, and those he did were the sort of men who were more or less unmoved by the trappings of worldly success.
John loved Herne Hill and was secretly pained that his parents did not share his affectionate association. Here, in his mother’s little parlour, the two of them had five times read aloud the entirety of the Bible, from Genesis to Apocalypse, all the hard names sounded out and repeated until he had mastered them. Here in the brick enclosed garden he had studied the movements of ants for endless hours, and grieved silently when the gardener swept them away. Here his beloved Newfoundland dog had bitten him when he was five and left the scar on his lip.
“I would like to pet Lion,” he had told Barkin, their coachman, who for a reason John could not now remember was carrying him in his arms across the stable yard. The odour of tobacco and horses surrounded John as the man lowered him to where the dog’s great head was buried in his bowl. Barkin laughed as John reached down with both chubby arms to encircle the huge muzzle. Lion’s possessive startle, and reactive snap at him was a blur. He cried out; and then his mother was before them all, scolding, holding her handkerchief to his streaming lip. He barely felt the lashing canine tooth. Most of all he remembered his surprise at being hurt by one he loved.
Here at Herne Hill he watched with delight the unfolding of the rose blossoms, tight bud to blown and spent petals to hard and unyielding rose hip. At seven he had, in secret, pulled a few of those tiny firm fruits from their thorned stems and crushed them between his teeth, to wonder how a flower so sweet could end in a fruit so bitter. In Spring he would sit in the chair his mother brought him and observe from a safe distance the activity of bees in the peach blossoms, and in August it was the red and dripping Herne Hill peaches he was forbidden to eat for fear he disrupt his digestion. Adèle had slept here, walked here, laughed at him here. All his young delight, and many of his frustrations, lay enclosed in those brick walls.
But Denmark Hill was less than a mile away. His new study would be as large and comfortable as the rest of the place, with ample room for new cases to house his mineral specimens. The house stood in seven acres of meadow and garden, and they could keep cows and pigs and plan flower beds and orchards. And he could walk down the sloping fields to Dulwich Gallery, and take his fill of pictures every day.
John Ruskin was wandering through the yellowing meadows of Denmark Hill, found them too small to contain his thought, and strode across the downs towards Camberwell. Hands thrust into the recesses of his rear pockets, he waded through ripe grasses and nodding flower heads. He spoke aloud, as he sometimes had need of while describing natural phenomena. That morning he wished to describe a painting by Turner, the noblest seascape that great painter of waters had ever achieved, and therefore the greatest seascape ever attempted. He had seen it three years ago at the Academy show, and had stood before it so long his eyes had blurred. He had been forced by his looking to close his eyes a moment, and when he licked his lips was surprised there was not salt upon them. The great Master had taken him upon that violent sea and set him in another ship from which he watched the awful unfolding of the activity on the first. Now in the fading meadows he understood and could put words to Turner’s accomplishment.
The painting was more than a masterful recording of elemental forces acting upon the puniness of a man-made vessel. The canvas conveyed heat and oppressive humidity of air. The sky, save for one small and retreating patch of pacific blue, was spasming with ivory, yellow, orange and red. The sea, broken as it was by wave, carried in it the ghosts of those shades upon a base of charry brown and lead gray. The ship being tossed upon that pitiless sea drove forward, stripped of all sail save the smallest foresail. Left in its wake was a quantity of its human freight, cast overboard, arm and leg chains still visible before the suck of water dragged limb and iron below. A phrenzy of fish swarmed the bodies.
...its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.
The intense and lurid splendour of it, the flakes of crimson and scarlet mirrored in jagged water peaks, the flaming clouds and white-hot shaft of setting sun, all transfixed John. Turner had light itself on his palette.
Turner called it ‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying––typhon coming on.’ In his manuscript John would call it simply ‘Slave Ship’, not bothering to mention or correct Turner’s spelling of the storm. He also named it the single work in which all of Turner’s immortality could rest.
“It’s in way of congratulations on the book––I know you’ve not yet done with it, but for its starting and near completion––and in way of a New Year’s gift, of course.”
With that his father had thrown back the green baize covering the display easel. There was Turner’s ‘Slave Ship.’ His. The chiefest, the sublimest, the purest and most perfectly realised Truth ever painted.
John could not speak for a moment. His father was still standing by it, holding one end of the baize in his hand, and his mother, seated by the splayed legs of the easel, began gathering up the pooling covering. His father was grinning, his mother smiling uncertainly, wanting the baize up off the floor.
“You showed me what you wrote of it–the choice was simple. Turner still had the painting and Griffith was for once not a sharper.”
John stepped forward to touch the frame, assuring himself.
“Two hundred and fifty guineas,” his father was saying.
It was worth kingdoms.
He turned to his father and extended his hand. His father took it and covered them both with his other. Here was his son before him positively glowing at his gift, and John James almost winced thinking that he might have refused the price asked for it. “A happy new year to you, my boy.”
They had a glass of sherry and spoke of where it should hang. John did not think it right to take it to his study with the Turner watercolours that had been past birthday gifts; his father, and all who entered the house, should have the pleasure of looking upon it. The breakfast room was covered over in delicate watercolours of roosting doves by William Henry Hunt, and a growing number of Turner lake scenes. They agreed that as subject for a dining room it was not the right choice. And it was so large.
They left his father’s ground floor study, and John pointed to the wall near the stair. “Here, in the entrance hall, don’t you think?” he asked his father. “We shall all of us have enjoyment of it there, and as I come down every morning it will greet me, just as I will pass it each time I go up to my study to work.”
“Some thoughts it will give you!” said his father with a laugh.
Come February John invited Turner to his birthday dinner. He had met him the first time just after he had got ill and left Oxford, at a dinner given by Griffith, Turner’s sales agent, and since been given the signal honour of being allowed to call on Turner at home. Brushed up, dusted down, and swathed in a storm-blue greatcoat and moth-eaten top hat, the great man was happy and kind. He saw the prominent location given his ‘Slave Ship’ and leaned in on the canvas, his eye nearly touching the vivid surface.
“I don’t like that fish,” he growled. He pulled back, and tapped the offending pale-lipped monster so smartly with the tip of his battered walking stick that John feared it would puncture. “I’ll come back and fix him.” I devoutly hope you will not, thought John, as he steered his guest into the dining room. Following dinner the honouree invited Turner to his study to see the favoured positions given the artist’s watercolour views of Richmond Bridge, Gosport, and Winchlesea. He did not reference the mass of manuscript papers overcovering his desk.
His father had a further presentation to make the next day. “I’ve hired George Richmond to paint your portrait, as a birthday gift,” he told him. Richmond had been one of John’s drawing masters, one that John still had a high opinion of. Richmond asked him how he wanted to be shown.
“Desk––outside too, if that makes sense––a pencil or crayon in my hand––or a pen––and in the background, Mont Blanc. Looking at my work––No, looking away.”
“At what?” Richmond had asked.
“Infinity,” he said.
The painting hung in a Royal Academy show. He laughed when he saw the placard: “John Raskin, Age 24, 1843.” His father was furious and had the title corrected.
Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters, proved by examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A., by a Graduate of Oxford.
Signing himself thus, and only thus, was John Ruskin’s half-ironic acknowledgement of the odd ‘Double Fourth’ Honours he had been granted at the conclusion of his interrupted education. And his father did not want him to risk his name until the reception to the work was gauged.
Five hundred copies were printed, and appeared in bookstores in May. It was four hundred and fifty pages and he knew it was just Volume I. A mere one hundred fifty copies were sold, but to the nation’s most erudite and incisive intellects. It made its way into the hands of Wordsworth and Browning. Mrs. Gaskell read it with Charlotte Brontë. Tennyson, that model of thrift, borrowed a copy. They all puzzled over who the brilliant young Graduate could be. In private, George Eliot venerated the anonymous author as a prophet. Ruskin knew none of this.
The Tory magazine Britannica, his father’s favoured journal, gave it a positive paragraph––but the reviewer was a family friend. John James scissored the piece out and contentedly pasted it in the scrap-book he had begun. The Athenaeum and Blackwood’s failed to mention Modern Painters. Turner simply ignored it.
The silence did not matter. John Ruskin had not written it to flatter Turner, but to express the truth as he had discovered it.