APPENDIX 625

1841

[This passage in the MS. follows ii. 20 of the text (p. 262), where Ruskin mentions Robert’s Sketches in Egypt and the Holy Land.]

Before then I had been in possession of the Pilgrims of the Rhine, entirely illustrated by him; and of the volumes of Landscape Annual,¹ in which were exquisitely engraved his drawings at Burgos, Granada, and Seville. I had been much interested by his careful and well-relieved rendering of tracery, and any meaningless ornamental forms or rich surfaces-such as those of tiled roofs, arabesque walls, and Gothic niches; and had been for some time modifying my own imitations of Prout by attempting to follow this more rich and, as far as it went, true manner of delineation. The Egyptian drawings were made with a diligence and patience greatly edifying to me, and with a precision of line which I had no pretence to equal, though I had been drawing little more than lines for the last seven years.

This linear work, however, was completed to the pitch of shadow that Roberts chose by flat grey washes, giving the forms of shade with precision and its gradations with delicacy, and finally touched, for light, with whitish yellow. I immediately saw the facilities given by these means for obtaining the essential forms in any subject, and their adoption at once enabled me to use what powers of delineation I had already obtained to the best possible effect. The drawings made on this principle satisfied myself, for the first time, and gave much pleasure to most people interested in the scenes they represented-such of them as I possess remain to this day delightful to me. I must run the chance of being tedious so far as to indicate the difference in the way I applied these restricted means, from their use by Roberts. To the end of his life Roberts remained merely a draughtsman and oil painter in grey and yellow-he never looked for the facts of colour in anything, nor received, as far as can be judged from his work, emotion from anything but in so far as it was large-varied in picturesque surfaces, and capable of being arranged in a composition of light things against dark ones, and dark against light.

How far at this time, on the contrary, I saw and enjoyed the colour I never attempted to represent, may be judged accurately from the passage of Modern Painters so often quoted by my shallow literary admirers -the description of sunshine after storm at La Riccia.² That passage is merely the description of one of the thousand thousand sights and scenes which were then the delight of life to me-but, in the splendour and fulness of them, wholly beyond any form of painting I had reached. And I had the general sense to draw only what I could draw, already, rightly, looking forward-as far as the serious fear of death now overshadowing me permitted-to being able to paint such things some day or other; or if not, to be happy in seeing Turner do them, while I

¹ [The Pilgrims of the Rhine. By the Author of “Eugene Aram” (Saunders and Otley, 1834)-illustrated by David Roberts. Jennings’ Landscape Annual for 1835, 1836, 1837, and 1838, contained “The Tourist in Spain, by Thomas Roscoe, illustrated by David Roberts.”]

² [See Vol. III. p. 279.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]