Lot Essay
John Brett's Val d'Aosta (sold Sotheby's, 20 June 1989, lot 24) is one of the most important of all Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, and certainly the supreme expression in landscape of Ruskinian values. As early as 1856, in his Glacier of Rosenlaui (R.A. 1857; Tate Gallery), Brett had shown the direction in which his art was moving, choosing a subject in the Bernese Oberland in homage to the recently published fourth volume of Modern Painters , entitled 'Of Mountain Beauty', and working under the guidance of Ruskin's protégé, J.W. Inchbold. The following year he painted The Stonebreaker (R.A. 1858; Liverpool), a genre subject with a social message set in an extensive landscape found at Box Hill near Dorking. By now Ruskin was well aware of Brett and his work, and he praised the picture highly in Academy Notes: 'This, after John Lewis's' he wrote, 'is simply the most perfect piece of painting with respect to touch in the Academy this year; in some points of precision it goes beyond anything the Pre-Raphaelites have done yet. I know no such thistle-down, no such chalk hills, and elm trees, no such natural pieces of faraway cloud, in all their works'. Then, after offering some criticisms, he summed up in a passage which betrayed his knowledge of Brett's next project, to paint the Val d'Aosta. 'If he can make so much of (chalk flint), what will Mr Brett make of mica slate and gneiss! If he can paint so lovely a distance from the Surrey downs and railway-traversed vales, what would he not make of the chestnut groves of the Val d'Aosta! I heartily wish him good-speed and a long exile'
Brett set out for the continent a little over a month after the appearance of Ruskin's review, arriving in the Val d'Aosta, by 30 June. He took a room in the Château St. Pierre at Villeneuve, some eight miles up the valley from the town of Aosta, making it his base for the next five months. According to Ruskin, writing in 1880, Brett painted the picture from the window of his lodgings, but it is not clear whether he chose the Château because it enabled him to paint the view he wanted, or the view because it could be seen from his window. What is certain is that the subject he selected - a view up the valley of the Dora Baltea, looking west from the Château, with the Testa du Rutor, covered with snow, in the distance, and Mount Paramount to its right - was far from being the most dramatic in the Val d'Aosta. As Allen Staley has written, 'If Brett had travelled further up the valley to Courmayeur, he could have painted the Italian flank of Mont Blanc, and from other points in the valley he could have seen the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa. Even at St. Pierre... Brett turned his back on the most spectacular scenery. La Grivola, due south of St. Pierre, and visible up the Val di Cogne, is higher than the mountains painted by Brett, and a more dramatic feature in the landscape' (The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 1973, pp. 129-30)
Another source of mystery is why he selected this valley at all, rather than some other favourite subject of Ruskin's such as the Valley of Chamonix or Lake Lucerne. The answer is probably that Ruskin was spending the summer at Turin, and would therefore be within easy reach if Brett needed advice. Indeed Ruskin, who loved nothing more than to supervise artists, was probably intent on giving it, and certainly did so. 'I sent for him ...,' he wrote to his father on 26 August, just before leaving Turin, 'because I didn't like what he said in his letter about his present work, and thought he wanted some lecturing like Inchbold ... He is much tougher and stronger than Inchbold, and takes more hammering; but I think he looks more miserable every day, and have good hope of making him completely wretched in a day or two more'. Ruskin's 'hammering', Allen Staley has argued (op. cit., p. 129), may well have been over Brett's choice of subject, which he (Ruskin) did not consider of sufficient natural grandeur, but whatever the case Brett returned to St. Pierre where he continued to work on his painting till mid-November. It was shown at the Royal Academy the following May, when Ruskin hailed it as an expression of his theory of 'historical landscape'. 'Yes', he wrote in Academy Notes, 'here we have it at last ... historical landscape properly so called-landscape painting with a meaning and a use ... for the first time in history, we have by help of art, the power of visiting a place, reasoning about it, and knowing it, just as if we were there ...'. It is true he was not uncritical, complaining that the picture had 'a strange fault, considering the school to which it belongs', namely that it was 'wholly emotionless ... I never saw the mirror so held up to Nature; but it is Mirror's work, not Man's'. Nonetheless when the picture failed to find a purchaser, Ruskin bought it for #200. He had learnt that Brett was short of money, and was no doubt also aware that he carried a heavy responsibility for the picture's conception and development
The present watercolour, hitherto unpublished, shows a somewhat different view from the painting; it is taken from a lower viewpoint and one further to the right, perhaps near the group of trees on the extreme right in the painting's middle distance. The disposition of the mountains is much the same, but the peak of the Testa du Rutor is even more hidden in clouds than it is in the picture. The inscription on the back by the artist's son states that the watercolour is 'a preliminary unfinished sketch' for the oil, and this cannot be lightly discounted; yet there are also arguments for seeing it as an independent work. Since Brett was, according to Ruskin, painting from his window, his viewpoint was more or less fixed, and it was not a matter of selecting one view among many; nor, since the painting was done direct from nature, would Brett have made preparatory studies in the way that he would if gathering material for a picture painted in the studio. There exists a watercolour comparable to ours and evidently painted about the same time since it is mounted on a page of the Spectator dated 4 September 1858 (private collection; photo in Witt Library); it is less finished and taken from an even lower viewpoint, but the distant mountain and foreground trees re-appear. If the two drawings are not studies for the painting, then they must have been made for their own sake, perhaps by way of relief from the gruelling discipline which the oil clearly demanded. There is also the interesting possibility that they were done in response to Ruskin's 'hammering', to try out effects that could not be incorporated in the already well-advanced painting
Whatever the exact purpose of our drawing, it is obviously intensely Ruskinian in terms of general context, subject and even handling. This is very comparable to that of Ruskin's own watercolours, and we know that Brett was keenly aware of his mentor's executive methods. In a letter to his sister written in 1858, the very year of the Val d'Aosta, he recommended her to mix white with her colours to make the paint more manageable; to abandon any systematic method of tonal modification to give a sense of distance - 'If you paint the things the right colour, and put in only as much detail as you see, they will do'; and to get this 'right colour' of nature by looking through a hole in a card (Staley, op. cit., p. 128). All these ideas characterised Ruskin's teaching at the Working Men's College and found expression in his handbook for artists The Elements of Drawing, published 1857
Brett set out for the continent a little over a month after the appearance of Ruskin's review, arriving in the Val d'Aosta, by 30 June. He took a room in the Château St. Pierre at Villeneuve, some eight miles up the valley from the town of Aosta, making it his base for the next five months. According to Ruskin, writing in 1880, Brett painted the picture from the window of his lodgings, but it is not clear whether he chose the Château because it enabled him to paint the view he wanted, or the view because it could be seen from his window. What is certain is that the subject he selected - a view up the valley of the Dora Baltea, looking west from the Château, with the Testa du Rutor, covered with snow, in the distance, and Mount Paramount to its right - was far from being the most dramatic in the Val d'Aosta. As Allen Staley has written, 'If Brett had travelled further up the valley to Courmayeur, he could have painted the Italian flank of Mont Blanc, and from other points in the valley he could have seen the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa. Even at St. Pierre... Brett turned his back on the most spectacular scenery. La Grivola, due south of St. Pierre, and visible up the Val di Cogne, is higher than the mountains painted by Brett, and a more dramatic feature in the landscape' (The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 1973, pp. 129-30)
Another source of mystery is why he selected this valley at all, rather than some other favourite subject of Ruskin's such as the Valley of Chamonix or Lake Lucerne. The answer is probably that Ruskin was spending the summer at Turin, and would therefore be within easy reach if Brett needed advice. Indeed Ruskin, who loved nothing more than to supervise artists, was probably intent on giving it, and certainly did so. 'I sent for him ...,' he wrote to his father on 26 August, just before leaving Turin, 'because I didn't like what he said in his letter about his present work, and thought he wanted some lecturing like Inchbold ... He is much tougher and stronger than Inchbold, and takes more hammering; but I think he looks more miserable every day, and have good hope of making him completely wretched in a day or two more'. Ruskin's 'hammering', Allen Staley has argued (op. cit., p. 129), may well have been over Brett's choice of subject, which he (Ruskin) did not consider of sufficient natural grandeur, but whatever the case Brett returned to St. Pierre where he continued to work on his painting till mid-November. It was shown at the Royal Academy the following May, when Ruskin hailed it as an expression of his theory of 'historical landscape'. 'Yes', he wrote in Academy Notes, 'here we have it at last ... historical landscape properly so called-landscape painting with a meaning and a use ... for the first time in history, we have by help of art, the power of visiting a place, reasoning about it, and knowing it, just as if we were there ...'. It is true he was not uncritical, complaining that the picture had 'a strange fault, considering the school to which it belongs', namely that it was 'wholly emotionless ... I never saw the mirror so held up to Nature; but it is Mirror's work, not Man's'. Nonetheless when the picture failed to find a purchaser, Ruskin bought it for #200. He had learnt that Brett was short of money, and was no doubt also aware that he carried a heavy responsibility for the picture's conception and development
The present watercolour, hitherto unpublished, shows a somewhat different view from the painting; it is taken from a lower viewpoint and one further to the right, perhaps near the group of trees on the extreme right in the painting's middle distance. The disposition of the mountains is much the same, but the peak of the Testa du Rutor is even more hidden in clouds than it is in the picture. The inscription on the back by the artist's son states that the watercolour is 'a preliminary unfinished sketch' for the oil, and this cannot be lightly discounted; yet there are also arguments for seeing it as an independent work. Since Brett was, according to Ruskin, painting from his window, his viewpoint was more or less fixed, and it was not a matter of selecting one view among many; nor, since the painting was done direct from nature, would Brett have made preparatory studies in the way that he would if gathering material for a picture painted in the studio. There exists a watercolour comparable to ours and evidently painted about the same time since it is mounted on a page of the Spectator dated 4 September 1858 (private collection; photo in Witt Library); it is less finished and taken from an even lower viewpoint, but the distant mountain and foreground trees re-appear. If the two drawings are not studies for the painting, then they must have been made for their own sake, perhaps by way of relief from the gruelling discipline which the oil clearly demanded. There is also the interesting possibility that they were done in response to Ruskin's 'hammering', to try out effects that could not be incorporated in the already well-advanced painting
Whatever the exact purpose of our drawing, it is obviously intensely Ruskinian in terms of general context, subject and even handling. This is very comparable to that of Ruskin's own watercolours, and we know that Brett was keenly aware of his mentor's executive methods. In a letter to his sister written in 1858, the very year of the Val d'Aosta, he recommended her to mix white with her colours to make the paint more manageable; to abandon any systematic method of tonal modification to give a sense of distance - 'If you paint the things the right colour, and put in only as much detail as you see, they will do'; and to get this 'right colour' of nature by looking through a hole in a card (Staley, op. cit., p. 128). All these ideas characterised Ruskin's teaching at the Working Men's College and found expression in his handbook for artists The Elements of Drawing, published 1857