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The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place John Dixon Hunt
London: Reaktion Books, 2020 Hardback, 288 pp., 180 illustrations, 102
in colour ISBN 978-1789142761. £35
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
The name of John Dixon Hunt should be familiar to all lovers of Ruskin,
as he is the author of one of the recent biographies of the most famous of Victorian
art critics: The Wider Sea, published
in 1992. An Emeritus Professor in the History and Theory of Landscape at the
University of Pennsylvania, Hunt is back some thirty years later with a book
explicitly devoted to Ruskin as a draughtsman rather than a writer; or, to say it
differently, Ruskin as primarily a
draughtsman, since Ruskin considered, among other things, that over the
centuries, drawing had proved an art more necessary to mankind than writing. In
this new volume published by Reaktion Books, John Dixon contends that, far from
being mere illustrations to his writings, Ruskin’s drawings were the first
necessary step in his approach to beauty, words coming second. The aim of the
book is to examine how Ruskin saw
things, how he learnt to look at places, in particular, and how to represent
them. As suggested by the title, Ruskin had his own conception of the genus loci, which was reflected in his
graphic works. Indeed, Ruskin’s scopophilia hardly had anything to do with
human beings: he was interested in nature, in buildings (paintings are very
seldom discussed in this book, logically enough), but he seems never to have
looked at people, except at his own face, for a few self-portraits, or Rose La
Touche’s. As Hunt deplores repeatedly, there is currently no catalogue raisonné of Ruskin’s graphic production, no database
gathering the totality of his drawings, “which admittedly would be an unwieldy
mixture of elegant and finished watercolours, fragmentary insights into the
visual world, diagrams, and illustrative materials, even drawings inserted into
his correspondence” [267]. Ruskin’s drawn and written oeuvre therefore appears
as a kind of hydra, a protean proliferation which can only be partially
apprehended. The Ruskin Library at Lancaster University does host a precious
archive of diaries, letters, drawings, prints and photographs, collected by
John Howard Whitehouse, but modern technology could allow for an even more
ambitious digital harvest: “in my wildest dreams I envisage a fully annotated,
critical and computerized edition of” The
Stones of Venice, confronting the manuscript, the published text and “all
the relevant drawings that sustained his final analysis” [184]. Faced with that
profusion of graphic works, John Dixon Hunt has managed to organise his study
along clear lines, focusing on the different categories of – mostly natural,
but also man-made – objects which Ruskin saw, drew, and then wrote about. This
is no mean feast, since Ruskin “learnt rapidly, enthusiastically, piecemeal and
idiosyncratically” [164], and could be quite a rambling writer or, to phrase it
in a more positive way, “he could adopt a dynamic relationship to whatever he
took as his subject” [265]. The book starts by establishing what the author considers the true
hierarchy between drawing and writing in Ruskin’s production. Far from being
mere footnotes to his written work, Ruskin’s pictures could more productively
be seen as the main text, since the two media “worked together, supplemented or
even competed with each other” [15], what Hunt calls “the paragone of drawing and writing” (Chapter 1), the rivalry and
collaboration between word and image. Ruskin always preached the necessity of
training the eye so as to liberate it from conventional vision; to really see
things, one needs a “practised eye”. Ruskin’s own training started very early,
and as a child or a teenager, he already wrote his own travel books which he
illustrated, imitating his favourite artists, thus forming his memory and his
imagination. John Dixon Hunt refers to Coleridge’s theory of primary vs. secondary imagination, Ruskin having
first observed, then used his imagination in a more creative way. Hence the
idea that there were several transforming events in the history of Ruskin’s
vision and art of drawing: the first time he really looked at “a piece of ivy around a thorn stem” and realised, while drawing it, that he “had never seen the beauty of anything” [40], the moment when he drew an aspen tree in Fontainebleau and finally
discerned that a forest fulfilled “the same laws which guided the clouds,
divided the light and balanced the wave” [41]. This understanding of nature
could only come through drawing, apparently, but those experiences are only
known to us thanks to what Ruskin wrote about them, that is thanks to the ekphrasis of possibly lost graphic works
(one may occasionally feel that Hunt’s claims tend to go a bit too far when
reading about such or such written description “that surely mimics in words
what a drawing would have tried to capture” [116]). In the perception of places, the picturesque is obviously a central
issue (Chapter 2). It is quite fascinating to witness, by looking at four
drawings selected by Hunt, how Ruskin went through a radical change in his
style as a draughtsman, moving away from the quaintly picturesque works of the
1830s and early 1840s to the daring, Romantic visions of the 1860s and 1870s
(though he only died in 1900, Ruskin’s progressive sinking into madness means
that he produced a far less substantial body of artworks after 1880). The
picturesque was a matter of composition – what Ruskin called “grouping” – of
movement, depending on how we walk toward the object to be admired, and of
“associations” which could almost only be expressed in words. There again, a
crucial change modified Ruskin’s perception, while he was in Switzerland in
1845, as he came to realise that Samuel Prout’s works were examples of the predictable
or “lower” “surface picturesque”, as opposed to Turner’s “noble”, “modern”
version, which expressed a deeper truth by gathering ideas, sensations and
associations. Hence this somewhat surprising assertion, for someone who
considered that nature had to be faithfully, even slavishly imitated: “Great
landscape art cannot be a mere copy of any given scene” [77]. John Dixon Hunt proceeds by studying the “most ardent and sustained
interests” for Ruskin’s eye, hand, and mind, starting with “geology,
mineralogy, mountains” (Chapter 3). A collector of stones since his childhood,
which he delighted in cataloguing in “dictionaries”, Ruskin almost compulsively
sketched rocks, strata and summits in his diaries so as to “adequately
illustrate the variety and richness of nature’s work” [91] or simply to forget
some painful circumstances of his private life. The study of geology helped him
master the “techniques of publishing with images” [102] and the use of visual
aids for his lectures. His love for the Alps, those “natural cathedrals”, and
Chamonix in particular, encouraged him to “let the visual speak for itself”
[125]. Ruskin’s passion for “water, rivers, meteorlogy” (Chapter 4) expressed
his fascination for changefulness, which was also manifest in his interest for
mountains perceived as ruins of a fallen world. To reflect the flow of water
through bridges, the rapid transformation of clouds, he had to provide more
than a mere mirror record. “Places and genius loci” are
the subject of Chapter 5. Hunt alludes to the writings of modern (French)
thinkers like Alain Roger and Augustin Berque on the notion in order to
determine through which elements, visual or emotional, Ruskin sought to make
sense of a place, or how Turner’s “visionary topography” could reflect the
“truth of a scene” and “portray the noumena
of a place” [175]. During his trips on the continent, Ruskin made repeated
stays in a few cities where he drew, measured and photographed the buildings in
an obsessive manner: Abbeville, Lucca, Pisa and Verona (his project of writing
a book entitled Stones of Verona
never came to fruition, even though this city “virtually represented the fate
and the beauty of Italy to me” [170]). Venice obviously deserved its own
specific focus (Chapter 6), since John Dixon Hunt deplores the fact that not
enough attention has yet been paid to what Ruskin drew in the Serenissima, as
opposed to what he wrote about it. Here again, Hunt asserts that “his drawings
actually shaped what he wrote ... his published ideas were shaped by his
illustrations, not vice versa” [184-185]. Faced with a complex layering of
historical styles, Ruskin went collecting “bits”, architectural details,
assisted by a whole team of painters and photographers, gathering the
materials, “graphic studies and visual thinking by which he came to his final
verbal and illustrated volumes” [199]. What daguerreotypes recorded could later
be translated into watercolours, “be subject to the processes of his own
imagination”, allowing him “to mark his own subtle emphases and focus, not the
camera’s” [227]. Chapter 7 is devoted to “drawing,
learning and teaching”. Neither an amateur (he reached too high a level of
competence to deserve that name) nor a professional artist (he never sold any
of his works), Ruskin initially emulated the picturesque style of Prout’s
engravings; Turner was an influence on his writing rather than on his drawing.
He later turned into a pedagogue, teaching extremely varied audiences, in F.D.
Maurice’s Working Men’s College or as a Slade Professor in Oxford. The
concluding chapter offers “an iconography and geography of Ruskin’s
imagination”, widening the scope of the very word “place”: “In any one ‘place’,
whether that ‘place’ is a location, painting or an idea, may be clustered a
range of different themes and approaches” [268]. And the book ends on this
apparent paradox that, though Ruskin’s drawings speak for themselves as
reflections of his many scientific and aesthetic interests, one has to use
words to write about them, beside the superb and numerous reproductions
provided by the publisher. ☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/reviews/hunt.html
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