Details
JOHN RUSKIN (LONDON 1819-1900 BRANTWOOD)
The Château of Amboise
pencil, pen and blue ink and watercolour, heightened with touches of white and with scratching out, on duplex paper
17 ½ x 11 ½ in. (44.4 x 29.1 cm.)
Provenance
Robert Ellis Cunliffe (1848-1902), and by descent to his daughter
Mrs. Dorothy Ellice Barton (neé Cunliffe, b.1884), and by descent to her son
Guy Barton (1907-1981) and by descent until
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 March 1983, lot 197.
Private Collection, USA, 1984.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 November 2000, lot 347.
Literature
E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (ed.), The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, London, 1903-12, vol. XXXV, pp. 301-2.
W. Robertson Nicoll, The Bookman, 'Ruskin-Eight Years After. The Library Edition of Ruskin', 1908, vol. XXXV, issue 205, opposite p. 16, illustrated.
J. S. Dearden, The Connoisseur, 'The Cunliffe Collection of Ruskin Drawings', 1969, vol. 171, no. 690, p. 237.
P. H. Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin, Oxford 1972, pp.45-6, pl.27.
I. Warrell, Turner on the Loire, London, 1997, pp. 202-3, fig. 189 (exhibition catalogue).
R. Hewison, I. Warrell and S. Wildman, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, London, 2000, p.64, no.40 (exhibition catalogue).
Exhibited
London, Society of Painters in Water-Colour, Ruskin Memorial Exhibition, 1901, no. 133.
Manchester, City Art Gallery, The Ruskin Exhibition, 1904, no. 89.
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Ruskin - An Exhibition to Celebrate the 150th Anniversary of his Birth, July-September 1969, no.7.
Munich, Haus der Kunst, British Council, Two Hundred Years of British Painting 1680-1880, November 1979 - January 1980, no.202.
London, Tate Gallery, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, March-May 2000, no.40.
Engraved
by Edward Goodall (1795-1870) for Part V of John Ruskin's 'The Broken Chain' in 'The Friendship's Offering', 1844.

Brought to you by

Alastair Plumb
Alastair Plumb Senior Specialist, Head of Sale, European Art

Lot Essay

'Those orbed towers obscure and vast,
That light the Loire with sunset last;
Those fretted groups of shaft and spire,
That crest Amboise's cliff with fire,
When, far beneath, in moonlight fail
The winds that shook the pausing sail'
(John Ruskin, The Broken Chain, Part V, xiv: Poems 2.169-170)

Ruskin wrote of this watercolour forty years after its execution that it was 'Representing the castle as about seven hundred feet above the river (it is perhaps eighty or ninety;) with sunset light on it, in imitation of Turner; and the moon rising behind it in imitation of Turner; and some steps and balustrades (which are not there) going down to the river, in imitation of Turner; with the fretwork of St. Hubert's Chapel done very carefully in my own way, - I thought perhaps a little better than Turner.' It embodies the enormous influence of Turner on Ruskin, and is one of Ruskin's most successful 'Turnerian' views. Turner had depicted the Château in 1826 as part of his Views on the Loire series (three watercolours are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), although his renderings do not take such a dramatic viewpoint and are set in a softly glowing sunset, rather than the sharp moonrise seen here.

Ruskin travelled to the continent in aged 21 in 1840-41, and on his return began writing his poem The Broken Chain, which was set at the Château of Amboise. The present watercolour was intended to be engraved by Thomas Jeavons to illustrate that poem, but Ruskin was unhappy with his work for Turner's Rivers of France, and subsequently his father appointed Edward Goodall to the project.

Robert Ellis Cunliffe was a Lancastrian solicitor who retired to 'The Croft' at Ambleside and formed a remarkable collection of Ruskin drawings following the artists death in 1900. The collection remained in his family until 1981, when some sheets were given to Abbot Hall, Kendal, and seven to King's College, Cambridge.

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