30 THE STONES OF VENICE

or Watts¹ could confer merit on that of London by first white-washing and then painting its brick streets from one end to the other.

§ 36. Contemporarily with this change in the relative values of the colour decoration and the stonework, one equally important was taking place in the opposite direction, but of course in another group of buildings. For in proportion as the architect felt himself thrust aside or forgotten in one edifice, he endeavoured to make himself principal in another; and, in retaliation for the painter’s entire usurpation

¹ [For Landseer, see Vol. IV. p. 334. This is the earliest mention in Ruskin’s books of G. F. Watts, R.A.; see further, § 39 n. Mr. Watts had in 1842 won a prize of £300 in the competition for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, and this enabled him to travel in Italy, where he remained for four years, spending a considerable time in Venice. Ruskin may have met him there in 1845. In 1846 he again won a prize in the Westminster competition, but he was only commissioned to paint one fresco-St. George and the Dragon, in the upper Waiting Room. The following undated letter must belong, as the address shows, to 1848-1851:-

“PARK STREET,

“June 9th, Morning.

“DEAR MR. COLERIDGE,-I write to your friend to come to me, if he can, on Wednesday evening, and I will tell him all I know about Venice.

“I seem further than ever from the power of making you a drawing-so I send you a little memorandum from a few knots of outwork Alp, rising over the lowlands of Savoy, which has some character in it-or at least may serve as a token of goodwill!

“Do you know Watts? The man who is not employed on Houses of Parliament-to my mind the only real painter of history or thought we have in England. A great fellow, or I am much mistaken-great as one of these same Savoy knots of rock-and we suffer the clouds to lie upon him, with thunder and famine at once in the thick of them. If you have time when you come to town, and have not seen it, look at the Time and Oblivion in his studio.

“With regards to Mrs. Coleridge and your daughter,

“Ever faithfully yours,

“J. RUSKIN.

“Watts, at 30 Charles St.

“The REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE.”

This letter is No. 1, in a privately-printed volume, Letters on Art and Literature by John Ruskin, edited by Thomas J. Wise (1894). Mr. Watts’s offer to paint in the hall of Lincoln’s Inn was accepted by the Benchers, and his “School of Legislature” may there be seen. His offer to decorate the great hall of Euston Station, with a series of frescoes representing the Progress of Commerce, was declined. His “Time and Oblivion” is at Eastnor. For Ruskin’s later references to Mr. Watts, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. viii. § 7; and The Art of England, Lecture ii. See also Ruskin’s letters to Watts, reprinted in a later volume of this edition from Mrs. Richmond Ritchie’s Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, 1892, pp. 136-139. Watts had in 1851 or earlier made two crayon portraits of Ruskin’s wife. “Watts’s Effie,” he writes (Sept. 21, 1851), “is lent to her father until we come back, and we hear it is much admired by everybody and thought quite perfect.”]

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