Search -
Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856-7
Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House 18567 Author:John Ruskin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX, As the number of pictures now at Marlborough House is large enough to give the reader some idea of the value of the entire collection, the following... more » notes respecting what I believe to be the best mode of exhibiting that collection, may perhaps be useful. The expediency of protecting oil pictures, as well as drawings, by glass, has been already fully admitted by the Trustees of the National Gallery, since the two Correggios, the Raphael, the Francias, the Perugino, the John Bellini, and Wilkie's " Festival," are already so protected. And of all pictures whatsoever, Turner's are those which must suffer most from the present mode of their exposure. The effects of all the later paintings are dependent on the loading of the colour; and the white, in many of the high lights, stands out in diminutive crags, with intermediate craters and ravines: every one of whose cellular hollows serves as a receptacle for the dust of London, which cannot afterwards be removed but by grinding away the eminences that protect it—in other words, destroying the handling of Turner at the very spots which are the foci of his effects. Not only so, but the surfaces of most of his later pictures are more or less cracked; often gaping widely:every fissure offering its convenient ledge for the repose of the floating defilement I am at a loss to determine what the standard of excellence may be which is supposed to warrant the national expenditure, in addition to the price of the picture, of at least two pounds ten shillings for plate glass; since I observe that Garofalo's " St. Augustine" reaches that standard; but Titian's " Bacchus and Ariadne" does not; this picture being precisely, of all in the gallery, the one which I should have thought would have been first glazed, or first, at all event...« less