MR. ARTHUR SEVERN AND PROFESSOR RUSKIN.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—May I call your attention to the enclosed cutting from the Spectator, as it contains statements absolutely false, both as regards myself and my painting ? Mr. Ruskin has never " found me in enthusiasm, patience, and humility," if I understand the sentence, though I cannot say he has never set a net of difficulties or problems in painting before me—he does that with all painters ; but I can say that I have proved myself too old a bird to hop into any such net, though I was once very nearly caught.
My pictures are never done with " fear or trembling," and never with more difficulty than occurs now and then to all painters of fleeting effects. If you will allow me, it would be a great satisfaction to me to come to your office some day, and show you what I can do in an hour, without any memoranda to work from except what is in my own head, and certainly without any " fear, trembling, and difficulty."
I have never been a pupil of Mr. Ruskin, because I was too old, or too hardened a sinner, when we were first thrown together, to change my own ways of feeling and seeing nature. And besides, if a painter is worth anything, he knows what he can do, and when at his best, does it.
Your critic winds up by saying (I suppose referring to what he thinks have been the difficulties thrown in my way by the Professor) "take him away, poor fellow, and let him have a ' good time' somewhere in recompense for all this labour," &c. Please assure him that although I laboured so hard over my Institute drawings, that the five were painted in five weeks, and that since then I have done three water-colours (small) and one six-foot oil sea-piece—all of which have gone to their homes; that even with all this, that I was at the Derby, driving from Box Hill, and yesterday following the new Thames Yacht Club in the race round the " mouse," and in a few days join a ten-ton yacht on the coast of Wales at Barmouth, and hope to spend the rest of the summer in my own sailing-boat on Conistone Lake, when not painting on the island in Derwentwater,—in fact, that I am going to have a happy time !
Let me say further that Mr. Ruskin is now staying with me, and had a good laugh this morning at breakfast when I told him the views your correspondent bad expressed about our relations in art ; and indeed I cannot help laughing myself when I think how entirely innocent he is of my "sloppy seas" and black fogs, and "sunsets over Westminster." Hoping you will excuse my writing at such length, and that you will put your correspondent right about my happiness and ways of work, I am, Sir, &c., Herne Hill, S.B., June 10th. ARTHUR SEVERN. [The sentence of which Mr. Severn complains runs thus :
" Let us take two more landscape-men who are members here, whose work is of great excellence in different ways,—Arthur Severn, the pupil and friend of Ruskin, and Alfred Parsons, without except ion the most exquisite draughtsman of Ile ver and foliage which the English school possesses. Severn would have been both a better and a worse artist bad it not been for Ruskin. The prophet has found him in enthusiasm, patience, and humility, but has shown him so many difficulties that his pictures seem always too much like advanced exercises.' We see they are done with fear, trembling, and difficulty. Take him away, poor fellow, and let him have a " good time " somewhere in recompense of all this labour.' Suds is our unuttered feeling about the artist who did them."
We fail to see what Mr. Severn has to complain of. In saying that he was the pupil and friend of Ruskin, we of course did not mean that the writer literally taught the painter the technical part of his art, but that he influenced his aims and methods, that he, in fact, in Mr. Severn's own words, " set a net of difficulties or problems before him." If, as Mr. Severn asserts, Mr. Ruskin has not "found him in enthusiasm, patience, and humility," the Professor's influence upon his friends must be strangely different to that which he exercises upon those who are personally unknown to him ; but, of course, on that subject we are open to correction by Mr. Severn. The fact remains that Mr. Severn's pictures, whether executed in five minutes or five years, do lack spontaneity, and rather resemble the working-out of problems of light and shade, than pictures in the ordinary sense of the word. —ED. Spectator.]
Previous page
