A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)Ruskin, John
Philosophy
A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)
Ruskin, John
Art
28. Thus, then, you see that you have to provide for your young men:
first, the searching or discovering school; then the calm employment;
then the justice of praise: one thing more you have to do for them in
preparing them for full service--namely, to make, in the noble sense of
the word, gentlemen of them; that is to say, to take care that their
minds receive such training, that in all they paint they shall see and
feel the noblest things. I am sorry to say, that of all parts of an
artist's education, this is the most neglected among us; and that even
where the natural taste and feeling of the youth have been pure and
true, where there was the right stuff in him to make a gentleman of, you
may too frequently discern some jarring rents in his mind, and elements
of degradation in his treatment of subject, owing to want of gentle
training, and of the liberal influence of literature. This is quite
visible in our greatest artists, even in men like Turner and
Gainsborough; while in the common grade of our second-rate painters the
evil attains a pitch which is far too sadly manifest to need my dwelling
upon it. Now, no branch of art economy is more important than that of
making the intellect at your disposal pure as well as powerful; so that
it may always gather for you the sweetest and fairest things. The same
quantity of labour from the same man's hand, will, according as you have
trained him, produce a lovely and useful work, or a base and hurtful
one; and depend upon it, whatever value it may possess, by reason of the
painter's skill, its chief and final value, to any nation, depends upon
its being able to exalt and refine, as well as to please; and that the
picture which most truly deserves the name of an art-treasure is that
which has been painted by a good man.
29. You cannot but see how far this would lead, if I were to enlarge
upon it. I must take it up as a separate subject some other time: only
noticing at present that no money could be better spent by a nation than
in providing a liberal and disciplined education for its painters, as
they advance into the critical period of their youth; and that, also, a
large part of their power during life depends upon the kind of subjects
which you, the public, ask them for, and therefore the kind of thoughts
with which you require them to be habitually familiar. I shall have more
to say on this head when we come to consider what employment they should
have in public buildings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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