152 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

Miltiades? What fools we should have thought them! how bitterly we should have been provoked with their folly! And that is precisely what our descendants will feel towards us, so far as our grand historical and classical schools are concerned. What do we care, they will say, what those nineteenth-century people fancied about Greek and Roman history! If they had left us a few plain and rational sculptures and pictures of their own battles, and their own men, in their everyday dress, we should have thanked them. “Well, but,” you will say, “we have left them portraits of our great men, and paintings of our great battles.” Yes, you have indeed, and that is the only historical painting that you either have, or can have; but you don’t call that historical painting. You don’t thank the men who do it; you look down upon them and dissuade them from it, and tell them they don’t belong to the grand schools. And yet they are the only true historical painters, and the only men who will produce any effect on their own generation, or on any other. Wilkie was a historical painter, Chantrey a historical sculptor, because they painted, or carved, the veritable things and men they saw, not men and things as they believed they might have been, or should have been. But no one tells such men they are historical painters, and they are discontented with what they do; and poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and imitate the grand school, and ruin himself.¹ And you have had multitudes of other painters ruined, from the beginning, by that grand school. There was Etty, naturally as good a painter as ever lived, but no one told him what to paint, and he studied the antique, and the grand schools, and painted

¹ [The two stages in Wilkie’s art here described correspond with two in his life. Up to 1822 he had been known as a genre painter. In that year, however, he exhibited an “historical” picture, “The Preaching of John Knox” (No. 894 in the Tate Gallery). In 1825 he set out for three years’ travel on the Continent (partly for the sake of his health), and it was the admiration he then conceived for the old masters that caused him henceforth to appear exclusively as an historical and portrait painter. For Ruskin’s early appreciation of Chantrey, somewhat modified after 1845, see Præterita, ii. §§ 26, 113, and compare Vol. III. pp. 653, 654; Vol. IX. p. 289.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]