INTRODUCTION xli

technique of oil-painting. The reader will remember his emphatic statement in one of the Oxford lectures, that “oil-painting is the Art of arts; that it is sculpture, drawing, and music, all in one, involving the technical dexterities of those three several arts.”¹ And so, again, in an earlier passage, “Colour, ground with oil, and laid on a solid opaque ground, furnishes to the human hand the most exquisite means of expression which the human sight or expression can find or require.”² This essay illustrates how carefully Ruskin had considered and analysed the processes and methods of manipulation by which mastery in this “art of arts” had been obtained, and the illustration is re-inforced in this volume by the “Notes in the Louvre”-largely, as will be seen, of a technical character.³ Ruskin, as already noted,⁴ made some early essays in oil-painting, but did not take kindly to them. Later in life, he perceived that to become an accomplished painter in this medium demanded the whole and the best energies of a strenuous life; but his critical study of oil-painting and its methods was long and careful, and the study was also so far experimental that he was constantly copying the works which he criticised and appraised.⁵

Ruskin’s Review naturally followed closely the scope of the book to which it was devoted, but the paper contains many passages in which the individuality of the reviewer makes itself heard. It begins characteristically with a description of a favourite spot at Florence, where he had spent happy hours in 1845 (see p. 251). The criticism on the management of the National Gallery, which he was presently to publish with emphasis, is hinted a little later in the Review (p. 256). His indifference to mere technicalities, in which he thought that Eastlake too much indulged, is clearly expressed (p. 255); the passages in which he gives the subject a wider scope, and connects technical processes with artistic aims and the characteristics of several schools, are among the most interesting in the Review (§§ 16, 27, 28). To point out these and other illustrations of doctrines new and old in the body of Ruskin’s teaching is a principal object of the footnotes to the text.

The essay on Prout, which stands next in this collection,⁶ is among

¹ “The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret” (Aratra Pentelici, § 227).

² The Stones of Venice, vol. ii., App. 12 (Vol. X. p. 456).

³ Compare in this connexion the Epilogue to The Stones of Venice (Vol. XI. p. 237).

⁴ See Vol. I. p. xxxii.

⁵ See Vol. IV. p. li.

⁶ At Vol. VIII. pp. xxxiii.-xxxiv. it was stated that this essay would be included in the volume containing Ruskin’s later “Notes on Prout” (1879). On further

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