for Mr. Ruskin tells us that "dust of thirty years' accumulation, black, dense, and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed and crumpled edges of these flattened bundles." There were also numbers of pocket sketching-books "dropping to pieces at the back, tearing laterally whenever opened, and every drawing rubbing itself into the one opposite."
What strikes us most in this disorder is not so much the deterioration of the sketches and drawings, which Turner possibly may not have foreseen, as the intolerable inconvenience of a system that must have made reference so difficult for the artist himself as to be always tedious and often impossible. A collection of studies should always be so arranged that any study whatever, even down to the most trifling memorandum, may be found at a moment's notice. The care of an artist's collection of studies is not, however, the subject of the present paper, which is addressed rather to the lay possessors of works of art than to professional artists.
Turner's way of keeping his drawings is a model of everything that the collector ought to avoid. Nobody but an artist would think of keeping drawings rolled up in bundles, for the simple reason that you can never see a drawing properly unless it lies flat. Then we learn that Turner exposed his collection to every one of the enemies that a prudent keeper provides against. These enemies are damp, dust, and vermin. In the case of water-color and oil pictures there are two other foes, light and darkness, a water-color being liable to fade in the light, and an oil-picture to turn yellow for the want of it.
Damp and mildew are often spoken of as two enemies, but in fact they are only one, as mildew is a fungus or collection of fungi thriving only in damp situations.[1] Damp, as everybody knows, is retained moisture, or, in other words, water diffused in minute particles that are held by some other substance so as to be prevented from joining each other and flowing away, while they do not get access to the air so as to be carried off by evaporation. Some substances are extremely favorable to the retention of damp, and it so happens that the millboard commonly employed by framers to put behind prints, and by book-binders who make portfolios, is one of those substances which absorb and retain damp with particular facility. It is employed by copper-plate printers to dry impressions, which are placed between sheets of mill-board under pressure, the boards soon drinking up the water contained in the wetted paper. The ingenuity of framers has led them to select this (of all substances in the world) to put behind engravings that are hung up on walls; and, when the walls happen to be damp, it follows as a matter of course that the engravings are spoiled by mildew or rust-spot. If the reader has ever lived in a
- ↑ So far as I know. My experience of mildew has been chiefly with prints and the sails of boats, which require almost as much care as prints, and in these cases mildew has always required damp as a condition of its existence.
