"as completely as you can in light and shade in half an hour." (2) "Finish such and such a portion of it" (given a very small portion) "as perfectly as you can, irrespective of time." (3) "Sketch it in color in half an hour.” (4) "Design an ornament for a given place and purpose." (5) "Sketch a picture of a given historical event in pen and ink.' (6) "Sketch it in colors." (7) "Name the picture you were most interested in in the Royal Academy Exhibition of this year. State in writing what you suppose to be its principal merits-faults-the reasons of the interest you took in it." I think it is only the fourth of these questions which would admit of much change; and the seventh in the name of the exhibition; the question being asked, without previous knowledge by the students, respecting some one of four or five given exhibitions which should be visited before the examination. This being my general notion of what an Art-Examination should be, the second great question remains of the division of schools and connection of studies. Now I have not yet considered—I have not, indeed, knowledge enough to enable me to consider-what the practical convenience or results of given arrangements would be. But the logical and harmonious arrangement is surely a simple one; and it seems to me as if it would not be inconvenient, namely (requiring elementary drawing with arithmetic in the preliminary Examination), that there should then be three advanced schools: A. The School of Literature (occupied chiefly in the study of human emotion and history). B. The School of Science (occupied chiefly in the study of external facts and existences of constant kind). c. The School of Art (occupied in the development of active and productive human faculties). In the school A, I would include Composition in all lan. guages, Poetry, History, Archæology, Ethics. In the school B, Mathematics, Political Economy, the Physical Sciences (including Geography and Medicine). In the school c, Painting, Sculpture, including Architecture, Agriculture, Manufacture, War, Music, Bodily Exercises (Navigation in seaport schools,) including laws of health. I should require, for a first class, proficiency in two schools; not, of course, in all the subjects of each chosen school, but in a well chosen and combined group of them. Thus, I should call a very good first-class man one who had got some such range of subjects, and such proficiency in each, as this: English, Greek, and Medieval-Italian Literature Political Economy Botany, or Chemistry, or Physiology. Painting Music.... Bodily Exercises.. ..... .High. .Average. Thorough, as far as learnt. .Thorough, as far as learnt. .High. .Average. Average. .High. I have written you a sadly long letter, but I could not man Believe me, my dear Sir, Very faithfully and respectfully yours, REV. F. TEMPLE. J. RUSKIN. Perhaps I had better add what to you, but not to every one who considers such a scheme of education, would be palpable -that the main value of it would be brought out by judicious involution of its studies. This, for instance, would be the kind of Examination Paper I should hope for in the Botanical Class: 1. State the habit of such and such a plant. 2. Sketch its leaf, and a portion of its ramifications (memory). 3. Explain the mathematical laws of its growth and struct ure. 4. Give the composition of its juices in different seasons. 5. Its uses? Its relations to other families of plants, and conceivable uses beyond those known? 6. Its commercial value in London? Mode of cultivation? 7. Its mythological meaning? The commonest or most beautiful fables respecting it? 8. Quote any important references to it by great poets. 9. Time of its introduction. 10. Describe its consequent influence on civilization. Of all these ten questions, there is not one which does not test the student in other studies than botany. Thus, 1, Geography; 2, Drawing; 3, Mathematics; 4, 5, Chemistry; 6, Political Economy; 7, 8, 9, 10, Literature. Of course the plants required to be thus studied could be but few, and would rationally be chosen from the most useful of foreign plants, and those common and indigenous in England. All sciences should, I think, be taught more for the sake of their facts, and less for that of their system, than heretofore. Comprehensive and connected views are impossible to most men; the systems they learn are nothing but skeletons to them; but nearly all men can understand the relations of a few facts bearing on daily business, and to be exemplified in common substances. And science will soon be so vast that the most comprehensive men will still be narrow, and we shall see the fitness of rather teaching our youth to concentrate their general intelligence highly on given points than scatter it towards an infinite horizon from which they can fetch nothing, and to which they can carry nothing. [From "Nature and Art," December 1, 1866.] ART-TEACHING BY CORRESPONDENCE. DEAR MR. WILLIAMS: I like your plan of teaching by letter exceedingly and not only so, but have myself adopted it largely, with the help of an intelligent under-master, whose operations, however, so far from interfering with, you will 1 This letter was, it appears, originally addressed to an artist, Mr. Williams (of Southampton), and was then printed, some years later, in the number of Nature and Art above referred to. much facilitate, if you can bring this literary way of teaching into more accepted practice. I wish we had more drawingmasters who were able to give instruction definite enough to be expressed in writing: many can teach nothing but a few tricks of the brush, and have nothing to write, because nothing to tell. With every wish for your success, -a wish which I make quite as much in your pupils' interest as in your own,— Believe me, always faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. DENMARK HILL, November, 1860. IL-PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS AND THE NATIONAL GALLERY. [From "The Times," January 7, 1847.] DANGER TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY.1 To the Editor of "The Times." SIR: As I am sincerely desirous that a stop may be put to the dangerous process of cleaning lately begun in our National Gallery, and as I believe that what is right is most effectively when most kindly advocated, and what is true most convinc 1Some words are necessary to explain this and the following letter. In the autumn of 1846 a correspondence was opened in the columns of The Times on the subject of the cleaning and restoration of the national pictures during the previous vacation. Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Eastlake was at this time Keeper of the Gallery, though he resigned office soon after this letter was written, partly in consequence of the attacks which had been made upon him. He was blamed, not only for restoring good pictures, but also for buying bad ones, and in particular the purchase of a "libel on Holbein" was quoted against him. The attack was led by the picture-dealer, and at one time artist, Mr. Morris Moore, writing at first under the pseudonym of "Verax," and afterwards in his own name. He continued his opposition through several years, especially during 1850 and 1852. He also published some pamphlets on the subject, amongst them one entitled "The Revival of Vandalism at the National Gallery, a reply to John Ruskin and others" (London, Ollivier, 1853). The whole discussion may be gathered in all its details from the Parliamentary Report of the Select Committee on the National Gallery in 1853. ingly when least passionately asserted, I was grieved to see the violent attack upon Mr. Eastlake in your columns of Friday last; yet not less surprised at the attempted defence which appeared in them yesterday.' The outcry which has arisen upon this subject has been just, but it has been too loud; the injury done is neither so great nor so wilful as has been asserted, and I fear that the respect which might have been paid to remonstrance may be refused to clamor. I was inclined at first to join as loudly as any in the hue and cry. Accustomed, as I have been, to look to England as the refuge of the pictorial as of all other distress, and to hope that, having no high art of her own, she would at least protect what she could not produce, and respect what she could not restore, I could not but look upon the attack which has been made upon the pictures in question as on the violation of a sanctuary. I had seen in Venice the noblest works of Veronese painted over with flake-white with a brush fit for tarring ships; I had seen in Florence Angelico's highest inspiration rotted and seared into fragments of old wood, burnt into blisters, or blotted into glutinous maps of mildew; I had seen in Paris Raphael restored by David and Vernet; and I returned to England in the one last trust that, though her National Gallery was an European jest, her art a shadow, and her connoisseurship an hypocrisy, though she neither knew how to cherish nor how to choose, and lay exposed to the cheats of every vender of old canvas-yet that such good pictures as through chance or oversight might find their way beneath that preposterous portico, and into those melancholy and miserable rooms, were at least to be vindicated thenceforward from the mercy of publican, priest, or painter, safe alike from musketry, monkery, and manipulation. 1 The "violent attack" alludes to a letter of "Verax" in The Times of Thursday (not Friday), December 31, 1846, and the "attempted defence" to another letter signed "A. G." in The Times of January 4, two days (not the day) before Mr. Ruskin wrote the present letter. "The Crucifixion, or Adoration of the Cross, in the church of San Marco. An engraving of this picture may be found in Mrs. Jameson's History of our Lord, vol. i. p. 189. |