IX. THE FEASTS OF THE VANDALS 405

176. The work of John Lewis¹ was a mirror of men only-of building and scenery as backgrounds for them; all alike rendered with an intensity of truth to the external life, which nothing has resembled before or since. But it was the external and animal life only. Lewis saw in men and women only the most beautiful of living creatures, and painted them as he did dogs and deer, but with a perception of their nature and race which laughs to scorn all the generic study of the scientific schools. Neither Andalusian nor Arab, Turk nor Circassian, had been painted before his time, any more than described before Byron’s; and the endeavours at representation of Oriental character or costume which accompany the travels of even the best-educated English travellers either during or immediately after the Peninsular war, are without exception the clumsiest, most vulgar, and most ludicrous pieces of work that ever disgraced draughtsmen, savage or civil.

No artist that ever I read of was treated with such injustice by the people of his time as John Lewis. There was something un-English about him, which separated him from the good-humoured groups of established fame whose members abetted or jested with each other; feeling that every one of them had something to be forgiven, and that each knew the other’s trick of trade. His resolute industry was inimitable; his colour-founded either on the frankness of southern sunlight, or on its subtle reflections and diffusions through latticed tracery and silken tent-resembled nothing that could be composed in a London studio; while the absence of bravado, sentiment, or philosophy in his subjects-the total subjection alike of the moral and immoral, the heroic and the sensual, to the mere facts of animal beauty, and grace of decoration, left him

¹ [For another appreciation of Lewis, see Vol. XIV. pp. 73-78. In speaking below of the “injustice” with which Lewis was treated, Ruskin refers to the comparatively small prices which the artist’s drawings fetched, and to the misunderstanding which led to his resignation of the presidency of the Water-Colour Society: see Roget’s History of the Old Water-Colour Society, vol. ii. p. 147. Lewis was subsequently elected A. R. A. (1859) and R. A. (1865).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]