l INTRODUCTION

Letters to the Times in this collection-the well-known pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, published on August 13, 1851.

In this pamphlet (§ 19) Ruskin mentions as an instance of the violent hostility entertained towards the new school, an anonymous letter which he received the day after his second letter appeared; he defends once more their pictures against the specific attacks made upon them; and hints not obscurely his regret at the Academy’s attitude towards the most promising of its students. Then taking broader scope, he seeks a harmony of his conclusions in admiring both Turner, with his imaginative sweep, and the Pre-Raphaelites, with their minuteness of detail. Taking Millais as the typical representative of the school, he draws out a contrast between the natural powers and aptitudes of the two artists. The element that he finds common to both is their sincerity in the study of nature.

The turn thus given to the pamphlet was no doubt due in part to the criticisms made on the previous Letters. To the second Letter of 1851 the Times made an editorial reply which is printed below¹ as necessary to the sequence of the story. The reply, it will be seen, sought

¹ “We should find it no difficult task to destroy the web which the paradoxical ingenuity of our correspondent, the ‘Author of Modern Painters,’ has spun, but we must confine our reply within narrower limits than the letters with which he has favoured us. If we spoke with severity of the productions of the young artists to which this correspondence relates, it was with a sincere desire to induce them, if possible, to relinquish what is absurd, morbid, and offensive in their works, and to cultivate whatever higher and better qualities they possess; but at present these qualities are wholly overlaid by the vices of a style which has probably answered its purpose by obtaining for these young gentlemen a notoriety less hard to bear, even in the shape of ridicule, than public indifference. This perversion of talent-if talent they have-we take to be fairly obnoxious to criticism; and we trust the authority of the ‘Author of Modern Painters’ will not have the opposite effect of perpetuating or increasing the defects of a style which, in spite of his assertions, we hold to be a flagrant violation of nature and truth. In fact, Mr. Ruskin’s own works might prove the best antidote to any such false theory; for (if we remember rightly) he has laid it down, in his defence of Mr. Turner’s landscapes, that truth in painting is not the mere imitative reproduction of this or that object, as they are, but the reproduction or image of the general effect given by an assemblage of objects as they appear to the sight. Mr. Millais and his friends have taken refuge in the opposite extreme of exaggeration from Mr. Turner; but, as extremes meet, they both find an apologist in the same critic. Aërial perspective, powerful contrasts of light and shade, with form and colour fused in the radiance of the atmosphere, are characteristic of Mr. Turner. The P. R. B.s, to whom the ‘Author of Modern Painters’ has transferred his affections, combine a repulsive precision of ugly shapes, with monotony of tone in such works as ‘Sylvia’ or ‘Convent Thoughts,’ or distorted expression, as in ‘Mariana’ or the ‘Dove in the Ark.’ Mere truth of imitation in the details of a flower, of a lock of hair, ceases to be truth in combination with the laws of effect. Nobody compares the pimples on a face by Denner with the broad flesh of Titian. Many of our correspondent’s assertions may be more summarily disposed of by a reference to the pictures in question than by discussion in this place; but though he has carried the rights of defence to their utmost limits, we submit that enough

[Version 0.04: March 2008]