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The Square at Cologne 1842. From the drawing in the collection of W. Pritchard Gordon. Esq. [f.p. 316,r]
316 PRÆTERITA-II
thoughts, by sweeter springs. The entry above quoted (p. 298) of Dec. 11th,1 the only one I can find of all the year’s journeying, is very notable to me, in showing that the impulse which threw the new thoughts into the form of Modern Painters, came to me in the fulfilment of the one disagreeable duty I persisted in,-going to church! But it came to me, two years following, in my true mother-town of Geneva.
We went home in 1842 by the Rhine and Flanders: and at Cologne and St. Quentin I made the last drawings ever executed in my old manner. That of the great square at Cologne was given to Osborne Gordon, and remains I believe with his sister, Mrs. Pritchard.2 The St. Quentin has vanished into space.
79. We returned once more to the house at Herne Hill, and the lovely drawings Turner had made for me, “Ehrenbreitstein” and “Lucerne,”3 were first hung in its little front dining-room. But the Herne Hill days, and many joys with them, were now ended.
Perhaps my mother had sometimes-at Hampton Court, or Chatsworth, or Isola-Bella-admitted into her quiet soul the idea that it might be nice to have a larger garden. Sometimes a gold-tasselled Oxford friend would come out from Cavendish or Grosvenor Square to see me; and there was only the little back room opposite the nursery for him to wash his hands in. As his bank-balance enlarged, even my father thought it possible that his country customers might be more impressed by enjoying their after-dinner
1 [The entry of “Dec. 11” does not actually belong, it should be understood, to “the journeyings of 1842,” but was written in at Herne Hill when Ruskin was already deep in “Turner’s work,” i. e., the first volume of Modern Painters. The order of events is this:-(1) in church at Geneva, July 11, 1841, an impulse to be up and doing (p. 298); (2) a similar impulse in the same place in the summer of 1842. (3) This impulse, received in two successive years, led to Modern Painters being commenced on his return home in the autumn of 1842: see the entries in his diary given in Vol. III. pp. xxix., xxx.]
2 [Here reproduced : Plate XVII.]
3 [The “Ehrenbreitstein” (or “Coblentz”) was No. 62 in Ruskin’s Exhibition of 1878: see Vol. XIII. pp. 454, 599. For the “Lucerne” (afterwards sold by Ruskin), see ibid., p. 602.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
