The Lovers' Parting

Francesa Alexander and John Ruskin

Pen and ink on paper

30.2 x 23.3 cm.

Beckwith, Victorian Bibliomania catalogue no. 32

Roadside Songs of Tuscany, p.143

Collection: John Hay Library, Brown University

When John Ruskin returned to Oxford in 1883 to assume the Slade Professorship for the second time, he titled his first lecture "The Realistic Schools of Painting." In his remarks he discussed the art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and WWilliam Holman Hunt. Near the conclusion Ruskin displayed a drawing by Francesca Alexander, praising her ability in depicting the impoverished "gracious and blessed" peasants of the Italian hill towns near Florence, where Alexander and her mother lived (Ruskin 33.283-84). Roadside Songs of Tuscany is a collection of some of the stories and poetry Alexander gathered from her Italian friends. [continued below]

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Commentary by Alice H. R. H. Beckwith

Speaking about Alexander's hand-illuminated collection of folklore from the Apennines allowed Ruskin to educate his Oxford scholars to the gifts of other cultures. Of Alexander he said he wished he could say she was English, "but," he told them, "all my prejudices have lately had the axe laid to their roots one by one,—she is an American!" At the same lecture, Ruskin promised his listeners more than the single page of Alexander's work. True to his word, he purchased her 109-page manuscript and, according to the preface of the 1885 edition of Roadside Songs of Tuscany, he placed sections of the original work in the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford; at Girton College, Cambridge; in Whitelands Teacher Training College, Chelsea; and at the St. George's Guild Museum, an institution for working men he established outside of Sheffield.

George Allen's 1885 edition of Roadside Songs is the result of Ruskin's desire to bring what he called the "poor people's poetry" of Italy to a wider audience, "conveying to the mind of our English peasantry (not to say princes) some sympathetic conception of the reality of the sweet soul of Catholic Italy" (Swett 24). Ruskin's preface informs us that this 1885 version consisted of "Mr. Hollyer's photographs of twenty of the principal illustrated pages pasted on heavy card, accompanied by interpretive text and notes by Ruskin and Alexander. To the late twentieth-century eye such a combination of handwork and photography may seem surprising, but it is understandable when we realize Ruskin was concerned that everyone who saw the work might come as close to the hand of the artist as possible. He believed photography accomplished this end as no other process could.

Francesca Alexander worked in pen and ink, and so black and white photographic reproduction of her lettering, illumination, and drawing does justice to her skill. Her illustration of a young Italian couple in country dress is set in an arch which in form is very like the frame of many a Renaissance miniature in Italian manuscripts. There is such a harmony of form and content in The Lovers' Parting that one can see why Ruskin forgave Alexander her somewhat stilted figure drawing. To link her blocks of text and the illustration, she chose a dandelion, that perennial wildflower, unkindly called a weed, and by her delicate rendering of it, turned it into a graceful and lively representative of the commonplace made noble.

By the time she wrote The Lovers' Parting, Alexander had begun a study of Italian writing in the manuscript libraries of Florence (Swett, 207). Her text has elements of Gothic precedent in the trefoils on the capital R and A's and in the swing of some other letters, but there is also the block-like clarity of the sixteenth-century Humanist style of writing here. Alexander was not interested in copying one particular style, but focused more on improving her own modern hand. Perhaps this was yet another feature of her work that impressed Ruskin, as well as her decision to create such a manuscript without thought of publishing it. From the l860s to the 1880s manuscript illumination was taken up by ladies and some gentlemen as a pastime reputed to lead to spiritual enrichment. Numerous manuals of instruction (cats. 52, 54) encouraged such expectations, and quite a number of women produced chromolithographed illuminated books. However, most of these popularized texts, such as Mrs. H. C. Hoskyns Abrahall's English Minstrelsy of ca. 1872, combined vivid color and a bewildering array of styles. Alexander's manuscript in its simplicity and its growth beyond the derivative is more like William Morris's illuminated texts of the 1870s (cat. 59).

References

Alexander, Francesa and John Ruskin. Roadside Songs of Tuscany.Sunnyside: George Allen, 1885. Printer: E. B. & G. Clarke. Francesca Alexander, translator, scribe, illuminator, and illustrator. John Ruskin, editor and commentator.

Beckwith, Alice H. R. H. Victorian Bibliomania: The Illuminated Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Exhibition catalogue. Providence. Rhode Island: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1987.

Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The Library Edition. 39 vols. London: George Allen: 1903-12.

Swett, Lucia Gray. John Ruskin's Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders. Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepherd Co., 1931.

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Last modified 29 December 2013