Unto This Last, and Other Essays on Political EconomyRuskin, John
General
Unto This Last, and Other Essays on Political Economy
Ruskin, John
Art; Economics
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.
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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