[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Bibliomania —> Artists —> John Ruskin —> Drawings and Watercolors —> Next]

Commentary by Alice H. R. H. Beckwith

Illuminated manuscripts stand at the center of John Ruskin's critical theories of art. They provided him with datable works, often in excellent condition, which could easily be studied comparatively. During the 1850s he examined 563 of the British Museum's illuminated manuscripts, recording his observations in his diary (Hauck 5). Ruskin used illuminated manuscripts as cultural documents. In this section of Modern Painters he illustrated illuminated manuscripts while defining the difference between Gothic and Renaissance arts as reflected in changing attitudes toward the realistic depiction of nature. He divided the history of art, and illumination in particular, into symbolic and imitative periods, designating the symbolic phase as from the earliest human history through the fourteenth century and the imitative from the fifteenth century to his own times. Ruskin favored the symbolic medieval work produced between 1250 and 1350. His influence on the reading and lecture-going public in Victorian England was profound, and had much to do with the popularity of manuscript illumination, which reached epic proportions by the 1860s.

Generally, Ruskin limited his use of color plates, preferring to concentrate on accurate outline and urging his readers to see the original manuscripts. Three wood engravings from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts in Modern Painters, volume III, were not colored (Ruskin 5.74, 266, 267). The two works illustrated in plate 7 were unusual for their color. Drawings for them were made by Ruskin's assistant, J. J. Laing, from the British Museum's Hebrew Pentateuch and an herbarium. Ruskin used color here because it was so important to his remarks at this point in his discussion. He had the work lithographed and hand-colored under the direction of Henry Shaw. In his introduction, Ruskin praised Shaw for his rendering of medieval ornament, also praising Mary Byfield for her wood engravings Ruskin 5.2). Ruskin's hesitancy in using color illustrations is justified by the history of plate 7. Each of the three copies in the Houghton Library, as well as chose in the Goodspeed Ruskin collection at Wellesley College, is different, and the many illustrated editions of Modern Painters that appeared in the United States throughout the nineteenth century have additional variations a color.

Comparison of the Laing-Shaw version of the apple tree in he Garden of Eden with that in the original manuscript reveals difference only in the background pattern. The original consists of a rectangular grid of black lines, but the true configuration of the background is lost in the facsimile by the predominance of a white diamond pattern. Ruskin's illustration is otherwise accurate. Even the feet and head of the serpent are just as they appear in the illuminated manuscript.

[The 1987 exhibition included a copy of the first edition from Harvard University, and the following comments refer to that copy; the image above comes from Cook and Wedderburn's authoritative Library Edition.] Originally, volume III of Ruskin's Modern Painters appeared in a green cloth publisher's binding done by Westleys & Co. of London. The present copy was rebound later by Riviere & Son ii full brown morocco with gold stamping on the square around the green, blue, and gold marble paper pastedowns. Simple and well-made of good materials, this binding is nevertheless different from the multicolored complex covers more typical of High Victorian design.

Bibliography

Ruskin, John. Works, "The Library Edition." eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.

---

Victorian
Web

Artists

John
Ruskin

Drawings

Next

Last modified 19 December 2013