Gainsborough to Ruskin

This view of Tivoli is a fine example of Lear's early style of draftsmanship. Executed in 1839, two years after Lear arrived in Rome, the Panoramic View of Tivoli was made in connection with the first of the artist's seven travel books, Views in Rome and Its Environs, published in London in 1841. Although not used for any of the lithographs in the book, this sheet was included in a portfolio of extra drawings accompanying Lord Stanley of Alderly's copy, ordered on subscription.

On 26 July 1843, Lear and his friend Charles Knight set forth on horseback on a two-week journey from Rome to Avezzano. When the friends parted, Lear spent the next few months retracing their journey on foot, stopping along the way to draw. The date for this work, 2 September 1843, places it on the artist's return trip. Lear used the drawing as the basis for a lithograph in his Illustrated Excursions in Italy (pl. 7). In his book he described Celano as "once an important fortress-town . . .

Lear left for Corsica on 8 April 1868, traveling with the writer John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), and completed his tour on 6 June 1868. By 9 May, Lear had decided to visit the great Corsican forests of Aïtone, Valdoniello, and Vico, and by the twelfth of that month he was in Valdoniello. The artist's journey was documented with illustrations in his last travel book, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, published in 1870.

This watercolor, one of Danby's many views near Bristol, goes beyond mere topographical recording. It is characteristic of the quiet and peaceful mood he achieved under the influence of the Bristol Sketching Society. Danby's association with this local group of artists was crucial to his development from 1818 to 1824.

This fresh, intimate sheet is from a now dismembered sketchbook in which Constable recorded views of the area surrounding Reading, Newbury, Abingdon, and Oxford during a sojourn in Berkshire in June 1821. Constable made at least seven drawings of Newbury during his visit, four bearing the same date as the present sheet; two are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and another is in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.

Cozens made two trips to Italy in the company of two important patrons: the first in 1776 with the antiquarian and connoisseur Richard Payne Knight and the second six years later with the wealthy young eccentric William Beckford. From sketches made on these trips, Cozens produced highly finished watercolors, such as this splendid view of Rome, which probably dates to the 1790s. This watercolor is the largest of three known versions of the subject by the artist; the other two are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the British Museum, London.

This portrait probably was intended for the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton, whom Ruskin had met in 1856. Writing from Brantwood on 27 December 1872, Ruskin promised Norton two self-portraits. He then recorded in his diary that he had begun work on the portrait on 28 January 1873. However, the completed drawings remained at Brantwood. The inscription on the verso is in the hand of Ruskin's cousin, Joan Severn, who, along with her husband Arthur Severn, was living with Ruskin at Brantwood; it appears that the portrait was given to her.

Ruskin learned to draw by copying the works of Samuel Prout and David Roberts and studying under Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding. Turner, however, would prove the greatest influence. Ruskin built a sizeable collection of Turner's early watercolors. The first volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters resulted from his reading a negative review of Turner's work. This drawing is a copy of the lower part of the Turner watercolor The Pass at Faido, St. Gotthard, which Ruskin commissioned.

Ruskin had planned to write and illustrate a history of the Swiss people based on the architecture of their towns. He first visited Brugg on 27 May 1858, and wrote to his father of "making a little sketch from the rocks of some houses which looked somewhat as if they might tumble into the Rhine before I got back again." This drawing was completed during a later visit to Brugg in November, 1862. The Swiss history was never realized.

Ruskin, who had been a student of Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, was greatly influenced by the work of Prout, Roberts, and especially Turner. These architectural studies are believed to have been done in 1848, serving as material for the artist's Seven Lamps of Architecture.