Beschreibung:

John Ruskin Four autograph letters signed, to George Jones R.A., executor to J.M.W. Turner discussing Turner's paintings and watercolours, 8 pages, 8vo, Denmark Hill and Bonneville, Savoy, 24 September 1850 to 3 June 1860, where dated, one letter dust-stained on blank verso,integral leaf removed from one letter RUSKIN AND THE TURNER BEQUEST: a series of letters touching on the shared interest of George Jones (Turner's friend, executor and one of the organisers of the Turner Bequest), and Ruskin, who arranged the first public viewing of the Bequest at Marlborough House in 1856-57, and was much involved thereafter. The earliest letter discusses the Marlborough House exhibition, referring to “the lovely things which are not in Marlborough House ... Those which I have exhibited are merely a sop to the public Cerberus [perhaps Ralph Nicholson Wornum keeper of the National Gallery], with which he seems contented ... I have got all the Rivers of France, and fifty magnificent blue drawings besides, withdrawn from the light and entirely safe at the National gallery”, adding that “the blue drawings appear to me much more instructive as to Turner's method of work than any others”. The letter of June 1860 discusses Ruskin's involvement with Turner in a more general sense, “It is my hope before I die, to be able in many profounder and more extended ways to illustrate Turner's work and character”, noting that he is in Bonneville making sketches to illustrate the Liber Studiorum. One of the two incompletely dated letters declines an invitation to see “the shut up Turners” [stored in the National Gallery] but asks for his friend the Edinburgh journalist Peter Bayne to be admitted “into the treasurehouse”. The other accompanies a gift of fruit - “I am afraid this basketfull will be like poor Turner's at Petworth” - and compliments Sophia Booth (Turner's former housekeeper at Chelsea): “Turner was not mistaken in the excellence of her heart”.