INTRODUCTION lix

of restoration in controversy, and then passes to the subject already mentioned-namely, the neglect to purchase good Italian pictures. “Let agents be sent to all the cities of Italy,” said Ruskin in conclusion, “let the noble pictures which are perishing there be rescued.” In after years his advice was taken; successive directors made annual tours of investigation in Italy, and many noble pictures were thus secured for the national collection.

Five years later the administration of the Gallery under Mr. Uwins, R.A., was criticised even more severely than that under his predecessor. Eastlake was then a Trustee, and there was internal dissension regarding the extent to which the Keeper should be allowed to carry out his “cleaning” operations. Some of the Trustees (Eastlake among them) desired to restrict the renovation to removing the old varnish; others were prepared to authorise the Keeper “to improve or repair the surface of the pictures below.”¹ The dispute found its way, as such things do, into the newspapers; there was a loud outcry, which in the following year led to the appointment of a Select Committee. To this second discussion Ruskin contributed another letter (pp. 407-414) to the Times (December 29, 1852). In this he laid special stress on the desirability of protecting the pictures by glass. Here, again, his advice was taken; the process of glazing the pictures was continued from year to year as the funds provided by the Treasury allowed, and has now for some time been completed. Ruskin went on to explain his views about the proper arrangement and display of a Picture Gallery generally. This was a subject to which he had been giving much attention during 1852, in connexion with hopes and plans for the Turner bequest; he returned to the subject in 1856, in his pamphlet on the oil-pictures included in that bequest; such illustrative matter from his letters and diaries of the time as pertains to this topic is reserved for the next volume, in which that pamphlet is reprinted.

At a later date Ruskin bore testimony to the great improvement of the Gallery, especially under the directorship of his friend the late Sir Frederick Burton.² In a preface to a book on the Gallery first published in 1888 Ruskin declared, of a collection which in 1852 he had stigmatised as a “European jest” (below, p. 398), that it was “without question now the most important collection of paintings in Europe, for the purposes of the general student.”³ The improvement of the

¹ Report of the Select Committee of 1853, p. ix.

² See The Laws of Fésole, ch. iv.

³ Preface (reprinted in a later volume of this edition) to E. T. Cook’s Popular Handbook to the National Gallery.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]