John Ruskin (British, 1819-1900)
La Cascade de la Folie, Chamonix
signed with initials, inscribed and dated 'Chamonix; 1854. JR.' (lower right)
pencil, pen and ink, watercolour and wash
40 x 31.1cm (15 3/4 x 12 1/4in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
Sir John Simon, MD, FRS, KCB and Lady Simon (almost certainly received as a present from Ruskin).
Sir John Simon sale, Messrs Trollope, 7 Hobart Place, Eaton Square. By order of the Executors of Sir John Simon. K.C.B., deceased, 40 Kensington Square, W. ...The Contents of the Residence ... including a number of water-colour drawings, by J. Ruskin ... etc., as 'La Cascade de la Folie' and its uplands, as seen from the old Hotel de l'Union, Chamonix, (with price of 22 [guineas] added in ink), 16 November 1904, lot 198.
Private collection, UK (probably acquired from the above).
Property of an Institution (gifted by the above).

Literature
Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, The Works on John Ruskin, Library Edition, London, 1903-12, vol. 5 (Modern Painters III), plate C, opposite p. xxii; and, vol. 38 (Catalogue of Ruskin's Drawings), p. 241.
Christopher Newall, John Ruskin – Artist and Observer, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2014, pp. 23 and 275, fig. 1.8.


The present lot is one of two drawings showing a particular feature of the mountain landscape at Chamonix made by Ruskin in the course of his stay there from 10 July to the end of August in 1854. Its counterpart, a somewhat larger drawing of the same topography but shown in a wider perspective and therefore allowing a view of fretted horizon and sky to be included, is in the collection of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1905P2).

The view shown is of a mountainside to the south-east of Chamonix which is known as the Montagne de Blaitière and at the summit of which lie the Glacier and Aiguille de Blaitière. The Cascade de la Folie, which took its name from a hamlet called Fouilly which once stood on the south-eastern edge of Chamonix, is now referred to as the Torrent de Blaitière. As seen in both drawings, the stream runs over relatively level ground at a higher altitude but then crosses a shelf or sill below which it flows more steeply within a jagged ravine with flanks of exposed earth. Dense groves of pine trees are seen on the folding ground above while fringes of trees stand along the upper edge of the ravine.

A distinction may be made between the sketches that Ruskin drew when walking and climbing in the mountains, often loosely treated and serving as memoranda of landscape formations, and the more deliberate drawings that he made from relatively convenient vantage points in the valley bottom and representing topographies to which he attached particular significance. The two views of the Cascade de la Folie are of this latter type.

The original titles of both the present drawing and that now in Birmingham identify them as having been made from the Hotel de L'Union, which in the nineteenth century stood at the centre of Chamonix close to the river Arve, and which – as the most comfortable hotel in the town – was where Ruskin and his parents chose to stay. From this vantage point the mountainside represented in the two drawings was seen at a range of between one and a half and two kilometres and at a steep angle of vision. Furthermore, the particular feature of the stream, sill and ravine on the Montagne de Blaitière as shown represents a very small part of the entire expanse of mountain landscape to be viewed from Chamonix and along the sides of the valley of the river Arve, and thus it may be understood that Ruskin operated a system of search and selection to find and then to focus on landscape elements which he considered to be especially interesting.

It may be assumed that Ruskin used binoculars or a telescope to give careful study of the landscape and it is known that he referred to daguerreotype photographs that he and his servant Frederick Crawley had taken to ensure the accuracy of his drawings (Daguerreotype 73 in the collection of the Ruskin Foundation at Lancaster University shows the Cascade de la Folie and the glacier and aiguilles above).

In the early months of 1854 Ruskin was in a state of despondency. The crisis in his marriage, although in a practical sense brought on by his having deliberately encouraged a friendship between his wife Effie and the painter John Everett Millais, leading to their falling in love, nonetheless was the cause of lingering anxiety. In April of the year Effie left Ruskin and shortly afterwards a suit for nullity of their marriage on grounds of non-consummation was served upon him. In May, Ruskin and his parents set out on a long tour of France and Switzerland, in part to escape from the unpleasantness associated with the failure of the marriage, and gradually his spirits recovered. He had an intense love of Chamonix and the mountains of Savoy, and so – on his arrival there on 10 July 1854 – he exclaimed: 'Thank God, here once more; and feeling it more deeply than ever. [...] all unchanged, and happy'.

Much has been written about Ruskin's sexuality, with the conclusion widely drawn that because his marriage to Effie was unconsummated, and because he never subsequently had the experience of physical love with any other partner, that he must have been in some way asexual or indifferent to the mechanisms of sexual attraction. In my view, and as previously discussed in the catalogue of the 2014 exhibition John Ruskin – Artist and Observer, particular drawings of his of landscape forms derive from or parallel feelings of sexual desire. These thoughts may have been entirely subliminal or were perhaps conscious explorations of the wish that he may have had for physical intimacy. The present drawing is one of the most striking instances of the translation that Ruskin made between landscape formations of protuberance and cleft and in which the whole is animated by the visible flow of water and the growth of organic nature, and the normally concealed parts of a woman's body. As I have emphasised, it was by no means by chance that he lit upon this specific part of the actual landscape at Chamonix; it was a topographical feature that attracted his fervent attention and at a time when his own unspoken preoccupation must have been much to do with the opportunity for, or conversely the determined abstinence from, sexual experience.

E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn included a photogravure plate of the present drawing, and another of the drawing referred to above showing the same topography which is now in Birmingham, in the introductory text of Modern Painters III in their Library Edition of Ruskin's works. A confusion occurred whereby the photogravure of the present drawing was identified as showing the version of the subject which belonged to Sir John Simon, whereas, in the catalogue of Ruskin's drawings which forms part of Volume 38 of the Library Edition, it was the drawing now in Birmingham that was claimed as having belonged to Simon.

It can now confidently be stated that it was the present drawing that Simon had in his collection and which was sold after his death in 1904. Professor Stephen Wildman has helpfully pointed out that the Birmingham version of the subject was apparently acquired by the museum through the agency of Arthur Severn. Furthermore, the watercolour sold from Simon's collection, according to the Messrs Trollope sale catalogue, had the dimensions 14½ x 12 inches (or 36.8 x 30.5 centimetres), which corresponds closely enough to the sight size of the present drawing – 40 x 31.1 centimetres – whereas the version of the subject in Birmingham appears to have been larger, with a sight size of 46.1 x 37.3 centimetres.

Sir John Simon, FRS, KCB (1816-1904), was an eminent physiologist and pathologist. He served as the government's first Chief Medical Officer from 1858 to 1876 and campaigned vigorously for better social conditions and public housing. Simon and Ruskin first met in 1854 when they were both invited to support a relief fund for victims of a cholera epidemic. Two years later, in August 1856, they met again, by chance, in Chamonix. On that occasion, Simon's wife Jane (born Jane O'Meara, and to whom Simon had been married in 1848) and Ruskin's parents were also present and a warm and enduring friendship came about between the two families. John and Jane Simon were highly intellectual and enjoyed the company both of scientifically minded individuals (Charles Darwin and Edwin Chadwick were to the fore amongst their circle) and writers (Tennyson, Swinburne and Morris was all friends). Among painters, the Simons knew the landscape painters John Brett and John William Inchbold, and were especially fond of Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana (who were briefly their immediate neighbours when in 1867 the Simons moved to number 40 Kensington Square). The Simons' house there was aesthetically decorated with Morris wallpapers, and on its walls were placed drawings by Ruskin as well as a fine Turner watercolour of Folkestone, works of art which were in each case given to them by Ruskin.

Ruskin and John Simon had so many interests in common and had such close understanding of one another that Ruskin could say of Simon that 'he is in all things as another self to me'. In Praeterita, Ruskin recalled that Jane Simon, 'with her husband, love[s] Savoy even more than I'. The support that they both offered to Ruskin at the time of his tragic love for Rose La Touche is recorded in a succession of Ruskin's diary entries from the 1860s, as for example in the following: 'Mr Simon came and comforted me in forenoon' and 'long chat with Mr Simon and loving sense of his deep friendship'. Clearly, both John and Jane Simon hugely admired Ruskin's drawings from nature and it seems that they – along with their friend in common, the American Charles Eliot Norton – encouraged Ruskin to draw as a form of therapy at times of emotional distress. In 1858, at a moment when Ruskin despaired of the usefulness of his drawings, he wrote to Simon: 'my own sketches from nature never will be good for anything, though I am glad that you and Mrs Simon find something to like in them'.

That the Simons had in their possession drawings from nature by Ruskin is in itself an indication of the close friendship that existed between each of the three. In Ruskin's lifetime his drawings and sketches were very little known other than to an inner circle of trusted people to whom he was prepared to show them, and on which occasions he would express both surprise and delight that friends should have found them works of art of such intense and sublime beauty.

Christopher Newall.
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Under glass, examined out of the frame. The sheet has been hinged to the mount in the top two corners verso. The mounted area of the sheet appears slightly bleached and there are lines of mount staining, not visible when framed. The edges of the sheet are uneven. There a few scattered spots of foxing and some surface dirt. There is a small patch of paper residue, probably from a previous mount, on the centre of the lower edge, and a tiny damage to the extreme lower right corner of the sheet, not visible when framed.