+ Expand
Provenance: Given by Ruskin to his Drawing School Collection at Oxford, but withdrawn by him in 1887 and presumably taken back to Brantwood.
W.H. Willink by 1912.
Anonymous sale, Bearnes, Torquay, 16 January 1991.
+ Expand
Notes: No-one has done more than Ruskin to encourage a love and understanding of Alpine scenery. 'His power of seeing the phenomena vividly' wrote Sir Leslie Stephen in 1900, 'was as remarkable as his power, not always shared by scientific writers, of making description interesting ... Many people have tried their hands upon Alpine descriptions since Saussure; but Ruskin's chapters seemed to have the freshness of a new revelation. The fourth volume of Modern Painters infected me and other early members of the Alpine Club with an enthusiasm for which, I hope, we are still grateful.'
This is quoted by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn in their introduction to the fourth volume of Modern Painters in the great Library Edition of Ruskin's works that they produced between 1903 and 1912. The Alpine Club, they continue, 'was not yet in existence, nor had any attempt as yet been made to scale the Matterhorn. Ruskin was not a climber in the Alpine Club's sense of the word, but he knew and loved the mountains as few other men have done, and in one respect at least he was an Alpine pioneer. He was the first to draw the Matterhorn accurately -- the first, too, he says, to photograph it, and the plates, no less than the descriptive chapters, in the fourth volume, may well have acted as a revelation and an incitement to the original founders of the Alpine Club -- men who, as Sir Leslie Stephen says, had learnt, in part from Ruskin, to find in climbing scientific and artistic interests as well as athletic exercise. Another past President of the Club, Mr Douglas Freshfield, has borne testimony to Ruskin's services in this respect. Ruskin, he says, "saw and understood mountains, and taught our generation to understand them in a way no one ... had ever understood them before. To begin with, he had a faculty of precise observation, the basis of all scientific research, which made him the most formidable of critics to any man of science whose eyesight might be temporarily affected by some preconceived theory. But this appreciation of detail in no way interfered with Ruskin's romantic delight in the whole, in the sentiment and spirit of mountain landscapes. In some minds mountains take the place of cathedrals as a source of an emotion that may be called -- in the wide sense of the word -- religious. Ruskin was so happily constituted that he drew equal delight and inspiration both from architecture and scenery. No writer has added so much to our enjoyment of Alpine scenery as Ruskin"'.
If Ruskin taught others to love the Alps, it was only because they were so central to his own aesthetic and moral value system. 'To the end of his days' his most recent biographer, Tim Hilton, has written, he 'never ceased to study the Alps and to associate them with the broad principles of his teaching, even his political economy.' He saw them for the first time in 1833, when he was fourteen, during the earliest of the many foreign tours that he was to make as a boy and young man with his parents. The experience was repeated in 1835, 1842 and 1844, when he discovered the Matterhorn thanks to a chance encounter with James Forbes, the distinguished scientist and expert on glaciers. Forbes and the Ruskins happened to be staying at the same inn at Simplon, and one evening Ruskin's father introduced himself and invited Forbes to look at his son's drawings. As Ruskin later recalled, among these was a sketch, made that very afternoon, 'of a great pyramid ... whose name I did not know, but, from its bearing, supposed it must be the Matterhorn, which I had then never seen'. Forbes soon corrected him. 'He heard kindly what I had to say about the chain I had been drawing; only saying, with a slightly proud smile, of my peak supposed to be the Matterhorn, "No -- and when once you have seen the Matterhorn you will never take anything else for it!"'
Ruskin was back in Switzerland in 1845, returning from a highly formative tour in Italy via the St Gothard Pass, and again in 1846; but it was not until 1849 that he made the intense study of Alpine scenery to which the present drawing belongs, and on which the analysis of the subject in the fourth volume of Modern Painters , so inspirational to young men like Sir Leslie Stephen, was based. Even before the publication of the second volume in 1846 he had known that he had to apply himself in this way in order to complete the book, but he was deflected by his decision to undertake The Seven Lamps of Architecture , researched in France during the autumn of 1848, written that winter and published the following year. The Swiss tour of 1849 was to be both a rest after his labours and a preparation for the next instalment of the great work that had started its wayward course as a defence of Turner. The marriage on which he had embarked in 1847 was already under strain and his wife Effie did not accompany him, going to stay with her parents in Scotland. His own parents, however, were his travelling companions, as so often in the past.
The party set out on 1 April and by 1 May had reached Geneva, which was their base for the next three weeks. On 23 May they moved to Vevay and on 13 June to Chamonix, where they remained a month and Ruskin did some of his most fruitful research. As E.T. Cook puts it, 'he worked upon the stones of Chamouni as diligently as upon the stones of Venice. He noted the angles of the aiguilles, observed every fleeting effect of cloud, examined the rocks, collected the minerals, gathered the flowers'. Everything was carefully recorded in diaries and notebooks and he was equally prolific as a draftsman, producing no fewer then 47 watercolour studies. When the month was over he pressed on to Zermatt, travelling along the Rhone Valley and seeing Mont Blanc, St Gervais and Courmayeur (where he was assailed by a sore throat) en route. By now his parents had returned to Geneva, and he was accompanied only by his faithful guide, Joseph Couttet, and his servant, George Hobbs.
They arrived at Zermatt on 2 August, and our drawing, showing the Matterhorn (or Mont Cervin) from the north-east, was made that very day. Ruskin wrote in his diary: 'A lovely day with sharp north wind. Drawing Matterhorn. Then up to a bed of overhanging rocks which I thought were marble, but found to be a pure and lovely quartz rock in thin folia.' He remained at Zermatt for a week before returning to his beloved Chamonix. On 9 August, just before leaving, he made another study of the great peak, comparable in conception and finish to ours but taken from a different angle. He has moved further east, and is looking at his subject from the moat of the Riffelhorn. This drawing, which belongs to the Guild of St George at Sheffield, is reproduced in the 1958 edition of Ruskin's diaries for 1848-73, pl. 36, and was included in the exhibition Ruskin and the English Watercolour held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in 1989 (no. 10, illustrated in catalogue). A third drawing of the Matterhorn made in 1849 is illustrated in the Library Edition, vol. 5, facing p.xxviii. At the time (1904) it belonged to Ruskin's medical friend Sir John Simon. Now in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard, it is reproduced again in the 1848-73 diaries, pl. 34.
Ruskin finally returned to England in mid- September, having been abroad five months, but within three weeks he was off again, this time with Effie and bound for Venice. His purpose was to gather material for his second great work on architecture, The Stones of Venice , issued in three volumes 1851-53. There were other distractions too. In 1851 he assumed a new role as champion of the Pre-Raphaelites and wrote the pamphlet enigmatically entitled Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds , in which he sought to disassociate his work from any taint of Roman Catholicism. In 1853-4 he delivered and published his Edinburgh Lectures, while his marriage, always unstable, finally collapsed. It was not, therefore, until the summer of 1854 that he again took up Modern Painters , and not until 1856, ten yeas after the last instalment had appeared, that Volumes 3 and 4 were published.
This long interval, however, did not dull Ruskin's impressions of Switzerland, so richly recorded in notes and drawings in 1849. Many a jotting in his notebooks was worked up into more formal prose, including some of the book's most famous purple passages, while the plates are often based on his Alpine sketches. Both the present drawing and its companion in Sheffield were engraved as the two halves of plate 38 in the section on 'Mountain Beauty' in Volume 4, our drawing becoming the right hand part. The engraver was J.C. Armytage, whom Ruskin admired as a craftsman and often employed.
Ruskin was forcibly struck by how deceptive the appearance of the Matterhorn is to the naked eye. 'No mountain in the Alps', he wrote, 'produces a more vigorous impression of peakedness than the Matterhorn.' Invoking the name of the mentor who had introduced him to the mountain in 1844, he continued: 'in Professor Forbes's work on the Alps, it is spoken of as an "obelisk" of rock, and represented with little exaggeration in his seventh plate ... Naturally, in glancing, whether at the plate or the mountain, we assume the mass to be a peak,' but the line which 'we suppose ... to be the steep slope of its side ... is a perspective line. It is in reality perfectly horizontal '. Two chapters on, Ruskin returns to this theme, describing how the Matterhorn 'in notableness of lateral precipice ... stands unrivalled among the Alps, being terminated, on two of its sides, by precipices which produce on the imagination nearly the effect of verticality'. In fact, however, 'there is only one point at which they reach anything approaching such a condition; and that point is wholly inaccessible either from below or above, but sufficiently measurable by a series of observations'.
Our drawing, taken from 'the slope of the hill above, and to the west of, the village of Zermatt,' is used to demonstrate the fallacy of this 'effect of verticality'. Ruskin makes his point with the aid of subsidiary diagrams and that formidable array of observation and logic that, as Douglas Freshfield noted, could demolish 'a man of science whose eyesight was temporarily affected by some preconceived theory'.
Ruskin stressed the drawing's objectivity again when he included it in his Drawing School Collection at Oxford in the 1870s, describing it as made 'with the same simple means' as the previous item in the catalogue, but 'with much more care. It is now valuable as recording the state of snow in midsummer on the Matterhorn in the year 1849, and as the first accurate drawing ever made of the mountain at all'. 'Accurate' the study may indeed be, but the artist's excitement in the presence of his awesome subject is also apparent. Brilliantly capturing the 'impression of peakedness' that the Matterhorn conveys, however deceptively, Ruskin demonstrates the truth of Freshfield's remark that his 'appreciation of detail in no way interfered with his romantic delight in the sentiment and spirit of mountain landscapes'.
We are very grateful to James Dearden for help with this catalogue entry.
