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Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas

1853

John Ruskin

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ruskin made this drawing at the same time that Millais was painting his portrait (no. 79), and it shows the same spot as Millais's background. The rock in the water in the lower right corner is the rock appearing behind Ruskin's bent knee in the portrait. Ruskin's vantage point was slightly higher than Millais's and closer to the opposite bank, looking directly across the stream, without the more extended view upstream that we see behind Ruskin in the portrait (see Grieve 1996, p.232). In a letter written on 6 September 1853, Ruskin described working within speaking distance of Millais and going on with the study, which he intended for the third volume of Modem Painters (Surtees 1979, p. 57). However, the drawing was not reproduced in Modern Painters, and Ruskin did not complete it in Scotland, but in London in 1854. In 1878 he described it as an 'old drawing of the Modern Painters time, which really had a chance of being finished, but the weather broke; and the stems in the upper-right hand corner had to be rudely struck in with body-color' (Works, XIII, p. 524). – 'Gneiss' is a word used for rock characterized by banded and foliated structure, but of varied mineral composition or genesis. In 1870 an Oxford catalogue listed the drawing as 'Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas' (ibid., XXI, p.34), but Ruskin's earlier references to it and to Millais's portrait do not mention gneiss. In Modem Painters he used 'gneiss' and 'slaty crystallines' interchangeably for the type of rock shown in no.8o, but with distinct preference for the latter term. Whatever he called it, the undulating structure of such rocks fascinated him: “For there is something, it seems to me, inexpressibly marvelous in this phenomenon, largely looked at ... These slaty crystallizes form the noblest hills that are easily accessible, and seem to be thus calculated especially to attract observation and to reward it ... we find a notable hardness in them, and a thorough boldness of general character, which make us regard them as very types of perfect rocks” (ibid., VI, p. 150; followed by four more pages of purple prose). – Made working side-by-side with Millais, no. 8o was Ruskin's first serious response to Pre-Raphaelitism in his own drawing. It far exceeds anything he had done previously in thoroughgoing precision, and his later comments about its 'chance of being finished' indicate his goal of bringing it to a Pre-Raphaelite degree of completion. He followed that with the remark, 'But all the mass of this rock is carefully studied with good method'. Subsequently, in summarizing his life from 1850 to 1860 in Praeterita, his making this drawing was the sole activity he recorded for 1853. “'Two months' work in what fair weather could be gleaned out of that time” (ibid. XXXV, p. 483).

Quoted from Allen Staley and Christopher Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p. 147