362 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

with the gentians in their earliest blue, and a soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and paint a gray wall of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to paint bouquets in china vases.

26. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the works of Samuel Prout:¹ his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by promiscuous intercourse or modern “improvement”; when, however, nearly every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar interest-half sorrowful, half sublime;-at that moment Prout was trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, every one made on the spot, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into nothingness.

27. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis;²

¹ [See Vol. III. p. 217; Vol. IX. pp. 300, 303; and in this volume the separate paper on Prout, published in 1849; and see also (among later passages) Vol. X. p. 301; Vol. XI. p. 24 n. (where the present passage is referred to).]

² [To J. F. Lewis (1804-1876) also Ruskin had already paid his tribute; see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 120). Plates XVI. and XVII. here are from drawings by Lewis in Ruskin’s collection.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]