Note 84 — LETTERS ON ART.

Mr. Ruskin’s offer was accepted, and he eventually arranged the drawings, and, in particular, the four hundred now exhibited in one of the lower rooms of the National Gallery, and contained in the kind of cases above proposed, presented by Mr. Ruskin to the Gallery. Mr. Ruskin also printed, as promised, a descriptive and explanatory catalogue of a hundred of these four hundred drawings. (Catalogue of the Turner Sketches in the National Gallery. For private circulation. Part 1.1857.—Only one hundred copies printed, and no further parts issued.)

Writing (1858) to Mr. Norton of his whole work in arranging the Turner drawings, Mr. Ruskin said: “To show you a little what my work has been, I have facsimiled for you, as nearly as I could, one of the nineteen thousand sketches (comprised in the Turner bequest). It, like most of them, is not a sketch, but a group of sketches, made on both sides of the leaf of the note-book. The note-books vary in contents from sixty to ninety leaves: there are about two hundred books of the kind—three hundred and odd note-books in all; and each leaf has on an average this quantity of work, a great many leaves being slighter, some blank, but a great many also elaborate in the highest degree, some containing ten exquisite compositions on each side of the leaf, thus (see facsimile), each no bigger than this—and with about that quantity of work in each, but every touch of it inestimable, done with his whole soul in it. Generally the slighter sketches are written over it everywhere, as in the example inclosed, every incident being noted that was going on at the moment of the sketch.”—“List of Turner’s Drawings shown in connection with Mr. Norton’s Lectures.” Boston: 1874. p. 11. The facsimile alluded to by Mr. Norton is reproduced here.