lx INTRODUCTION

Gallery, and especially its acquisition of Italian pictures, were due in large measure to the taste and enthusiasm which his own writings had stimulated.

In connexion with one of the principal topics in these letters, it is interesting to know that Ruskin tried to practise what he preached. He wanted the National Gallery to be enriched, as we have seen, with pictures of the great Venetians. When he was at Venice in 1851-1852, he saw a chance of securing for the Gallery two first-rate pictures by Tintoret; one of these, the “Crucifixion” in St. Cassiano, was in his opinion “among the finest in Europe;”¹ the other was the great “Marriage in Cana,” of the Salute.² Among the Trustees of the National Gallery was Lord Lansdowne, with whom Ruskin had some acquaintance. He opened the subject to the Trustees in March 1852, as appears from the following letter to his father:-

“VENICE, March 1852.-... Now that Lord Lansdowne is at leisure, I am going to write to him to ask him if there is no way of getting some of these pictures to England. It is a piteous thing to see the marks and channels made down them by the currents of rain, like those of a portmanteau after a wet journey of twelve hours; and to see the rents, when the bombshells came through them, still unstopped-indeed better so, for if they were to patch them up, they would assuredly begin to retouch them, and so farewell Tintoret.”

Through his friend Mr. Cowper-Temple, Ruskin enlisted also the support of Lord Palmerston, and he was in correspondence further with Sir Charles Eastlake, who was then President of the Royal Academy as well as a Trustee of the Gallery. The first answers seem to have been encouraging, though Ruskin chafed-as who has not?-at the dilatoriness of official ways. “I have a letter from Sir Charles Eastlake,” he writes to his father, on May 16, “...with some important report of progress respecting National Gallery and Tintoret. I will enclose you his letter on Tuesday, but must show it to some people to-morrow. I fear nothing can be done-they are too slow, but I am glad to find that I have some power, even with such immoveable people as Trustees for [the] National Gallery.” The Trustees, meanwhile, were consulting Edward Cheney, who, as Ruskin afterwards believed, “put a spoke in

¹ See Venetian Index in Vol. XI. p. 366.

² Ibid., p. 429.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]