TURNERIANA

Speranza

The story has been around so long that it has acquired the patina of truth: how the prudish Victorian critic John Ruskin was so horrified by the erotic drawings left behind by the artist J. M. W. Turner that, like some 19th-century Savonarola, he burned them on a bonfire after Turner's death.

But like the similarly titillating tale that attributes Ruskin's failure to consummate his marriage to his revulsion at the sight of his bride's pubic hair, the story might not be true.

A painstaking trawl through Turner's work has led everybody to conclude that most, if not all, the erotic art still remains in the collection and that the bonfire, said to have occurred in 1858, almost certainly never happened.

Ruskin appears to have been tried and convicted by the standard version of his involvement with the Turner bequest, which characterizes him as the man who destroyed any surviving evidence of his hero's sex life.

Although the bonfire incident has passed into the popular imagination as one of the defining landmarks of Victorian censorship, what evidence there is to support this version of events is surprisingly slight.

The erotic work, part of the enormous cache of Turner material comprises dozens of sketches of naked women and nudes of both sexes in erotic entanglements, and was most likely inspired by Turner's trips to brothels and other places of ill repute.

The erotic sketches show Turner to be open to all visual impulses and to be able to express even more aspects of human life.

And so they increase his genius, because they're very beautiful.

But Ruskin, whose "Modern Painters" series and other works established him as the premier cultural critic of his time, and who had long been Turner's greatest champion, was horrified by the sketches.

He discovered them after Turner's death, when he was cataloguing the artist's work for the National Gallery, to which Turner had left his vast collection.

With his intimate knowledge of Turner's work, Ruskin was singularly well suited to the job.

But he was shaken and disgusted by the erotica, which militated against everything pure and classical that he cherished and which he was convinced would tarnish Turner's artistic standing if made public.

Turner's erotic sketches are little scrappy drawings of people in intimate congress, and they're all part of an artist's observation of nature, you could say.

But to Ruskin's mind they would have been distasteful and not very interesting.

The story of the bonfire is based on several published accounts.

But significantly, the accounts all appeared years after the fact and came from people, including Ruskin, with self-interested reasons for spreading the tale.

The most compelling argument for the bonfire's existence came from Ruskin, in a letter he wrote in 1862 to Ralph Nicholson Wornum, and his supposed collaborator in the destruction of the Turner sketches four years earlier.

"I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner's reputation (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace," Ruskin wrote.

"And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction; and I hereby declare that the parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December, 1858."

But Ruskin's letter was motivated by recent passage of the Obscene Publications Act, which made it illegal to possess pornographic pictures, and was an effort to protect Wornum and himself.

In addition, with the recent publication of a scandalous Turner biography, with which Ruskin had initially cooperated, it was perhaps to his advantage to appear as if he had been trying to protect Turner's reputation by eradicating the erotica.

The matter came up again in 1869, in an entry in the diary of William Michael Rossetti describing a gathering in Chelsea of pre-Raphaelite luminaries, including Ford Madox Brown and William Morris.

"Among the Turners left to the National Gallery were a large number of a great degree of indecency," the entry reads in part.

"These were burned by Wornum and Ruskin, at the time when the latter was arranging the bequest at the National Gallery."

But the source for the story was Charles Augustus Howell, Ruskin's indiscreet and unreliable private secretary, who had his own motives for spreading interesting gossip.

In any case, there is no physical evidence that any of the pictures were destroyed, and Wornum, who kept a diary, never mentioned meeting Ruskin, or burning any pictures, on the relevant dates in 1858.

With about 30,000 works on paper by Turner and with various methods of counting individual works used over the years, it is impossible to tell if every drawing still exists.

But we can account for almost every page torn out of the dozens of notebooks that Turner left behind.

It seems that rather than destroying the works he found distasteful, Ruskin concealed them, in some cases gathering and tucking them away (one of the folders containing erotica was marked "kept as evidence of a failure of mind only") and in other cases folding pages over to cover the racy bits.

The new information will help put to rest the bonfire story and educate people about the great service Ruskin did for Turner.


Without Ruskin, we wouldn't have the Turner bequest as it exists today.

He cataloged it, he put it on its first public exhibition and he did an enormous amount to champion Turner.

As for Ruskin and his marital life, the critic's marriage, to Effie Gray, was indeed never consummated.

Ruskin admitted it himself when his wife sought a dissolution of the marriage in 1854 to marry the John Everett Millais, whom she had met when he was painting her husband's portrait.

Happily for her, that marriage was consummated; the couple had eight children.

But the story about Ruskin's being upset by Effie's pubic hair, supposedly because he had previously seen only classical depictions of nudes, is another piece of nonsense.

Ruskin went to Oxford as an undergraduate, and it was almost certain that he would have been exposed to the things students normally get up to.

There would have been no difficulty in either seeing the real thing, or the equivalent of modern pornography.

This has helped correct Ruskin's reputation as a hysterical scold.

"The man has been maligned as a sort of Victorian prude with personal problems.

Whatever the case, this is not borne out by the way he actually cared for the future of Turner's bequest.

Whatever his personal views, and in spite of the Obscene Publications Act, he worked very hard to protect them.

So he's a hero, really.