xlii INTRODUCTION

the most charming of Ruskin’s earlier pieces. It appeared in The Art Journal of March 1849, and was published anonymously; though, indeed, it was signed all over by the author of Modern Painters. To the friendship of Ruskin and his father with Prout, reference has already been made;¹ both at Herne Hill and Denmark Hill they had him for a neighbour. The biographical details given in this essay were doubtless derived from the artist himself, and it is therefore the standard authority in that connexion. For Prout’s drawing, Ruskin had from very early years a great admiration; it served as the model for his own first exercises in sketching.² In the first volume of Modern Painters he bore his testimony-somewhat cautious in the original edition, larger and more emphatic in the third-to Prout’s high qualities as an artist.³ The more Ruskin studied medićval architecture, the higher became his appreciation of Prout’s rendering of it. In the first volume of The Stones of Venice he coined the word “Proutism,”⁴ to denote the system of treatment whereby that artist reproduced with signal fidelity the spirit of the architecture he loved. Further study confirmed his judgment:-

“Please tell Mr. Prout when you happen to see him,” Ruskin wrote to his father from Venice (October 14, 1851), “that I have constant occasion to refer to him, as the only modern parallel of Lombardic sculptors, that I find my word ‘Proutism’ the most useful I have yet coined, and that I enjoy and admire his works more than ever. Only this morning I have been looking all the while I was dressing at that sketch of the Hotel de Ville at Ulm, which you must recollect our going hunting for (i.e. not the sketch, but the subject of it), ages ago, in the town itself; and I am quite amazed at the skill and science of little bits of drawing which I used to think mere manner and accident, and that I should be able in time to do like them myself. But I find Prout is inimitable-in his way-as even Turner. And the poor shallow coxcombs of artists that pretend to look down upon him!”

The constant occasion thus to refer to Prout’s work was taken in several pages of the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice.

consideration, it has been thought more convenient to give the earlier paper in this place, in order to complete the collection of Ruskin’s occasional pieces during the present period. For the one exception still admitted, see above, p. xvii.

¹ Vol. I. pp. xlii., 216 n., 662.

² See Vol. II. pp. xl., xli.

³ See Vol. I., comparing pp. 216-220 with p. 256.

⁴ See Vol. IX. pp. 300, 303; and compare p. 320.

⁵ See Vol. X. p. 301, Vol. XI. pp. 24 n., 58, 160.

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