Rocks and torrent, Glenfinlas

In the summer of 1853 Ruskin and his wife, Effie, spent several weeks at Brig o’Turk, in the Trossachs near Stirling, Scotland with the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais and his brother, William Millais. During the visit, Millais painted a portrait of John Ruskin standing at the side of a stream running through gneiss rock. They had originally intended staying for a few days, but the decision that Millais should paint Ruskin’s portrait at Glen Finglas ('Glenfinlas') changed their plans. Describing the setting in a letter to his father, Ruskin wrote, 'a lovely piece of worn rock, with foaming water and weeds and moss’ (LE 12 (1904)/xxiv).

Ruskin stood against the backdrop of gneiss, an ‘inexpressibly marvellous' metamorphic rock that has distinct layers of varying mineral composition. Later, he would describe the temptation to ‘devote half a volume to a description of the fantastic and incomprehensible arrangements of these rocks’ in Modern Painters IV (LE 6 (1904)/150). While he stood for Millais, Ruskin examined the rocks and watched the fast-moving water. In his diary for 20 July he noted drawing on the rocks by the stream.

Ruskin’s watercolour painting Rocks and torrent, Glenfinlas was also made during the summer of 1853. It expresses Ruskin’s interest in the relation between rock and water, change and transformation, and representation. In depicting the closely focused section of the stream, Ruskin has followed his own precept, expressed in Modern Painters IV (‘The Truth and Untruth of Stones’) that ‘it is not the outline of a stone, however true, that will make it solid or heavy; it is the interior markings, and thoroughly understood perspectives of its sides’ (LE 6 (1904)/372).

Ruskin engaged with emerging theories in the earth sciences. In Modern Painters IV, he subscribes to the parabolic view of the earth’s history put forward by Charles Lyell in the Principles of Geology (1830 – 1833). Lyell explains the modern era is that in which forms are being broken down: water and glaciers wear away the mountain peaks, and fill the valleys with their debris. Lyell’s argument conflicted with Biblical chronology and a notion of permanent creation. Ruskin’s refused to speculate on the remote past, and would later attempt to prove that streams and glaciers ‘find’, rather than cut, their way: illustrating an internal tension between scientific and religious knowledge.

Reference no. 1996P1465