Part 1 (1/2)

Lectures on Landscape

by John Ruskin

I

OUTLINE

1 Inthis professorshi+p I should direct you, in your practical exercises, chiefly to natural history and landscape And having in the course of the past year laid the foundational elements of art sufficiently before you, I will invite you, now, to enter on real ithter I can in elementary study of landscape, and of a branch of natural history which will fory

[Footnote 1: ”Lectures on Art, 1870,” -- 23]

In the outset I must shortly state to you the position which landscape painting and aniher branches of art

2 Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence It imitates the aspects, and records the phenoerous or beneficial towith these, and of enjoying the fro of syates the laws of greater and less nobility of character in organic forreater and less develop is to bring into notice the ht of conditions of power or beauty, as that of physiology is to ascertain the minor conditions of adaptation

3 Questions as to the purpose of arrangeans of an animal are, however, no less within the province of the painter than of the physiologist, and are indeedthan dissection For as you dissect an anienerally assume its form to be necessary and only exa the outer form itself attentively you are led necessarily to consider the mode of life for which it is disposed, and therefore to be struck by any aardness or apparent uselessness in its parts After sketching one day several heads of birds it became a vital matter of interest to me to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill; but on asking a great physiologist, I found that it appeared to him an absurd question, and was certainly an unanswerable one

4 I have li to the representation of pheno to human life You will scarcely be disposed to admit the propriety of such a limitation; and you will still less be likely to conceive its necessary strictness and severity, unless I convince you of it by somewhat detailed exareatest time--Vesuvius in repose, Vesuvius in eruption

One is a beautiful harmony of cool color; and the other of hot, and they are both exquisitely designed in ornamental lines But they are not painted for those qualities They are painted because the state of the scene in one case is full of delight to er And it is not Turner's object at all to exhibit or illustrate natural pheno in themselves

[Illustration: VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION

Fro by Turner]

He does not want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature of evaporation; nor this lava strearavity on ponderous and viscous s life and joy to men, and the lava streaain here are two sea-pieces by Turner of the saraphs froh; the other the wreck of an Indiaman

These also are each painted with exquisitely artistic purpose: the first in opposition of local black to diffused sunshi+ne; the second in the decorative grouping of white spots on a dark ground That decorative purpose of dappling, or [Greek: poikilia], is as studiously and deliciously carried out by Turner with the Daedalus side of hi of these white spots on the India a precious toy in ebony and ivory But Turner did not paint either of the sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangeh as a professor of physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshi+re coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of iiven momentum He painted this to show you the daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable you to conceive so of utterreat deep

6 You may easily--you eration in this statement It is so natural to suppose that the main interest of landscape is essentially in rocks and water and sky; and that figures are to be put, like the salt and ive it a flavor

Put all that out of your heads at once The interest of a landscape consists wholly in its relation either to figures present--or to figures past--or to hu of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to hu of this bit of stone For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you

This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be--as if it was aThere is no le of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock, than in a horizontal one The only thing thatto you in a landscape than the other, is that you could tumble over the perpendicular fracture--and couldn't tumble over the other A cloud, looked at as a cloud only, is nothan so much feculence in dirty water It is merely dirty air, or at best a che painted at all depends upon its being the means of nourish place of iinary Gods There's a bit of blue sky and cloud by Turner--one of the loveliest ever painted by human hand But, as a mere pattern of blue and white, he had better have painted a jay's wing: this was only painted by hinifies the coleam of sweet sunshi+ne in windy weather; and the wind is worth thinking of only because it fills the sails of shi+ps, and the sun because it warms the sailors

7 Now, it is most important that you should convince yourselves of and fully enter into this truth, because all the difficulty in choosing subject arises from mistakes about it I daresay soone out often in thethat there was no good subject to be found in it That always arises froh with its vital character, and looking for physical picturesqueness instead On the contrary, there are crude efforts at landscape-painting, made continually upon the most splendid physical phenomena, in America, and other countries without any history It is not of the slightest use Niagara, or the North Pole and the Aurora Borealis, won't make a landscape; but a ditch at Iffley will, if you have huers and ditchers, and frogs

8 Next, here is one of the most beautiful landscapes ever painted, the best I have next to the Greta and Tees

The subject physically is a rass above a stream with some wych-elms and s A level-topped bank; the water has cut its way down through the soft alluvion of an elevated plain to the limestone rock at the bottom

Had this scene been in America, nobut a grass bank with sorouping The stream at the bottom is rocky indeed, but its rocks are ray and shapeless There's absolutely nothing to paint anywhere of essential landscape subject, as commonly understood