the principles of art, but in the endeavour to defend an individual painter from injustice.'
In that endeavour, it is now almost superfluous to say, the book was entirely successful. The high prices that Turner's latest and less generally admired pictures brought in his own lifetime, and the magnificent sums that even drawings of a few inches square from his hand have been sold for since his death, prove the efficiency of Ruskin's advocacy.
He did 'defend an individual painter from injustice'—that painter the greatest of his age with a penetration into the hidden truths of art; a critical insight invaluable and perhaps unique; a clearness of argument, a splendour of imaginative illustration, and an eloquence and purity of diction, which have hardly been surpassed by any English writer. No inconsiderable part of the estimation in which the works of the miserly and eccentric genius—a barber's son, who saw scarlet in the sky—are held to-day among the dilettanti is the result of Ruskin's criticism upon them.
The author of 'Modern Painters' is not only the first among English art-critics, but he is the first of them. Before his time, no writer on art of our country had a European reputation. The name of Reynolds was well known, it is true, in connection not only with his works as a painter, but with his 'Discourses' delivered when he was President of the Academy; but although these lectures contained much information gathered during a long and laborious study of art, they are, after all, but a text-book for students, and owe their modern reputation to the simple and chaste style in which they are written, and the excellent advice they give to young artists, rather than to any pretensions either to elevated criticism or masterly acquaintance with the whole of the wide subject on which they treat.
We once heard a bishop recommend their perusal to a number of young men whom he had ordained, as models for their sermons, on the ground that Sir Joshua's celebrated 'Discourses' contained 'very fine moral precepts, besides being written in very elegant English.'
This was true. Though the President's lectures had neither the fire of Burke, nor the wit and power of Johnson, they possessed great literary merit, and were as much above the art-writers of their day as Ruskin's 'Modern Painters' was above the criticism of 1843.
