Characteristically, Miss Evans makes no mention of this recognition. She does, however, point out that when Ruskin chose one hundred water colors from the Turner Bequest for exhibition he "published a Catalogue of them, arranged rather childishly to illustrate a supposed tour up the Rhine, through Switzerland to Venice and back" (p. 235). Miss Evans unfortunately does not mention that Ruskin made a practice of following Turner's sketching tours in an attempt to locate the artist's originals, a practice which provided Ruskin with much solid evidence about the way Turner imaginatively rearranged particular scenes. Martin Hardie's authoritative Water-Colour Painting in Britain, eds. Dudley Snelgrove, Jonathan Maine, and Basil Taylor, 3 vols. (London, 1967), II, 44, takes such procedure as representative of Ruskin's thoroughness as a critic of Turner. Ruskin's arrangement of the water colors, I believe, derives importantly from his desire to create a unified group of work such as Turner always desired.
Last modified 2000