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Dimensions: 16.5 by 25 cm., 6 1/2 by 9 3/4 in.
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Provenance: Anonymous sale at Christie's, 15th November 1988, lot 181
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Exhibited: Society of Painters in Water-colour, 1875, no.312;
Coniston, July-September 1900, no.191;
Royal Society of Painters in Water-colour, Ruskin Exhibition, February-March 1901, no.359;
Fine Art Society, March-April 1907, no.147
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Literature: E.T.Cook and A.Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. XXXVIII, 1903-12, p.249, no.638
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Notes: In the Spring of 1874 Ruskin was invited to stay with friends in Sicily. He had suffered from an extreme bout of depression the previous year and, keen for a change of scenery, he readily accepted the invitation. He combined his visit with a tour of the continent and his itinerary may be followed from his published letters: he left Bolougne on 30th March, paid a short visit to Sicily in late April, went via Naples to Rome where he stayed a month (May-June), and returned via Lucca and Florence to Oxford by the end of October.
Ruskin's unstable condition did not improve with travelling, however, and he was horrified by the poverty he encountered in southern Italy. In comparison, however, he was delighted with the beauty of Sicily and the serene landscape depicted in the present watercolour coloured with jewel-like washes reflects a rare moment of calm which he experienced that Spring.
Cook and Wedderburn record four drawings of Etna from Taormina, including the present work (see Literature). The first (no.637), is dated April 26 and is now in the British Museum (see Paul H.Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin, 1972, p.112, pl.90). Numbers 639 and 640 are currently untraced, although number 640 is illustrated by Paul Walton (op.cit., pl.91).
Ruskin described the scene depicted in the present watercolour in a letter to Joan Severn dated 28 April 1874 and written from Messina: 'Such another sunrise as I saw this morning...the smoke of Etna was drifting in one soft horizontal bar, twenty miles long, eastward from the summit. I know the distance within a mile or two, for Etna summit is ten miles from the shore and the smoke...drifted another ten miles out over the sea. But where it rose from the crater, it was in close, pure, thunderous masses of white, which took the rose of sunrise exactly as a thundercloud would - a white one...' (E.T.Cook and A.Wedderburn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin, 1903-12, vol.XXVII, pp.94-5)
