Ruskin was generally unimpressed and uninterested in Callcott, nevertheless, his first reference to the artist, which was appreciative, appears in the Poetry of Architecture (1837-38). Here he comments upon the lack of public taste where visitors to the Royal Academy could be seen 'passing by Wilkie, Turner, and Callcott, with shrugs of doubt or of scorn...' Cook and Wedderburn note dryly that: 'A few years later, Ruskin himself passed by Callcott somewhat contemptuously' ( Works, 1.7). His diaries include only one (slight) reference to the artist written on 19 May 1843, around two weeks after the publication of the first edition of Modern Painters I. He notes :'In at Sir J. Swinburne's and saw Turner's large fellow picture to the Crossing the Brook, as well as several Callcott's' ( Evans and Whitehouse, Diaries I, p. 247). During his tour abroad in 1845, Ruskin in a letter to his father, refers to 'Callcott's cattle piece [which] is not worth 50£'(sic). (An editorial note states this to be possibly An English Landscape, No 71 in a sale of the Knott collection at Christies on 26 April 1845).
In a later letter, he claims to share his father's assessment of Callcott 'admirable, my very feelings about him'. John James Ruskin had written on 28 August 1845:'Good gentlemanly bits of work-chaste-cold as the Icicle... His paint is cleanly laid on... but look you I say paint, not colours. I see neither colour not atmosphere to satisfy...' (see Shapiro, Ruskin in Italy p. 191, n 2). In the final volume of Modern Painters Ruskin fumes about a catalogue 'allowed to be sold at the gates of the National Gallery, for instruction of the common people, [which] describes Callcott and Claude as the greater artists' [ greater than Turner]. ( Works, 7.454)