John Ruskin

On verso at upper left in graphite, tktk. Typescript on separate piece of paper affixed to frame backing, On back of water color with cows in left foreground. / From folder which Mrs. Viljoen marked: "Ruskin / Water Colors / (One of six made under C. Fielding) / 1836" / On back of picture: 1836 J Ruskin, one of six made under Copley / Fielding, see Praeterita (35, 215-16) / Referred to in Praeterita 1. Chap. X [crossed out] 11. (Roslyn / Chapel). Exhibited Manchester 1904. No. 33. / [In Mrs. Viljoen's handwriting]: / 33. Copy from Copley Fielding / (Mrs. A. Severn) / "In a very little while, however, I found that this great first / step did not mean consistent progress at the same pace. I saw that / my washes, however careful or multitudinous, did not in the end look / as smooth as Fielding's, and that my crumblings of burnt umber / became uninteresting, after a certain number of repetitions. With / still greater discouragement I perceived the Fielding processes / to be inapplicable to the AlpsÖ..[etc.] Praeterita !, 12)"; below this in the hand of Van A. Burd, in blue ink, Came to V. Burd through Mrs. H. G. Viljoen (1974). Typescript by Van A. Burd on second piece of paper affixed to frame backing, Van Burd's comment, May 1993: This appears to be [inserted in pencil: "one of"] the watercolor which / Ruskin describes in Praeterita when he was taking lessons in London / under Copley Fielding in 1836 at age 17. "And thus the proposed six lessons / in Newman Street ran on into perhaps eight or nine, during which Copley / Fielding taught me to wash color smoothly in successive tints, to shade / cobalt through pink madder into yellow ochre for skies, to use a / broken scraggy touch for the tops of mountains, to represent calm lakes / by broad strips of shade with lines of light between them (usually at / about the distance of the lines of this print), to produce dark clouds / and rain with twelve or twenty successive washes, and to crumble burnt / umber with a dry brush for foliage and foreground. With these instruction, / I succeeded in copying a drawing which Fielding made before me, some / twelve inches by nine, of Ben Venue and the Trossachs, with brown / cows standing in Loch Achray, so much to my own satisfaction that I put my / work up ovwer my bedroom chimney-piece the last thing at night, and / woke to its contemplation in the monring with a rapture, mixed of / self-complacency and the sense of new faculty, in which I floated / all that day, as in a newly discovered and strongly buoyant species of / air" (Work, 35:215-16). This picture is No. 675 in Cook and Wedderburn's / Catalogue of Ruskin's drawings (Works, 38: 251). The editors also list / a drawing of Loch Achray when Ruskin visited this lake in Scotland on / 24 June 1838, but that apparently is a later work.* Loch Achray is / in County Perth, just south of Loch Katrine. / *See Works, 38: 225.