The Stones of Chamonix

 

John Ruskin, View from my Window at Mornex, c. 1862-1863

Images from Wikimedia Commons

If you're in Edinburgh this summer you'll be able to see the National Gallery of Scotland's exhibition John Ruskin: Artist and Observer, an in depth look at his often-underrated paintings and drawings.  Gary Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books, puts their relative neglect down to the fact that Ruskin 'rarely completed pictures of a conventional sort', focusing instead on details and fragment, painting the landscape as he saw it rather than conjuring up sublime scenes or sentimental vignettes.  Wills regrets that the exhibition does not do more to acknowledge Ruskin's political interests: 'there are many drawings of Gothic architecture in the show—yet no mention of his connection between Gothic and workmen. There are obsessive tracings of sky and clouds—yet his ecological concerns for a coal-darkened England are nowhere mentioned.'  Instead, Ruskin's mental health and famously anguished attitude to women are foregrounded.  'His sexual repression is expressed, we are told, in compensatory fixations on mountain clefts and caverns as vaginas. Well, sure enough, there are some split rocks here—how could Ruskin have drawn hundreds of mountain scenes and avoided them?'

John Ruskin, Rocks and Vegetation, Chamonix, c. 1854

 

John Ruskin, The Casa d'Oro Venice, 1845

 
Looking to see what other reviewers in Canada made of it, I came upon the Ottawa Magazine, whose 'Artful Blogger' finds Ruskin's private life far more intriguing than his art and concludes with a reference to his 'steamy landscapes' in which there is a hidden sexual element.  Much more useful is a review on The Victorian Web, that venerable website which is clearly still putting up valuable and interesting material.  And the short video tour with curator Christopher Newall that I've embedded below is well worth a watch.  In it he describes Ruskin's fascination with the individuality and craftsmanship of the Byzantine capitals used in building St Mark's, and horror at plans to reconstruct the facade of the basilica, which were fortunately thwarted.  He talks about Ruskin's intricate sketch of glacial rocks in Scotland and his passion for stones in both architecture and landscape (Ruskin said that had he not discovered the art of Tintoretto, he would have written a book called The Stones of Chamonix).  He also refers to Ruskin's bipolarity, but in a way that illuminates the painting - a vivid sketch of winter sunset on the Venetian lagoon conveys the delight Ruskin clearly felt at the time, but writing later in his diary, Ruskin regretted that he had felt the beauty of the place so intensely that he was now 'suffering the consequences'.