In
Graves, Dictionary of Artists (
1884),
Runciman is assigned the specialty of a historical painter, and he is credited with 57 exhibitions between
1825 and 1867, of which 16 were at the Royal Academy,
25 at the British Institution, and 16 at the Suffolk Street Exhibitions (i.e., the Society of British Artists) (p. 203). [check ref works in
Harris].
Walton
says that
Runciman “tried unsuccessfully for years to attract favourable attention as a painter of landscapes, genre scenes, and historical subjects” (9).
Runcimanʼs metier was teaching of perspective (
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 261 n. 13), reflected in
Ruskinʼs description of a lesson: “I took my paper & I fixed my points,
& I drew my perspective, & then as Mr
Runciman bid me, I began to invent a scene”.
Working within this method,
Ruskin constructed a scene by means of what he termed “patch[ing] . . . together”: “I examined one of
Maryʼs pictures,
to see how the rocks were done, & then another to see how the woods were done, & another to see how the moutains were done,
and another to see how the cottages were done, and I patched them all together, & I made such a lovely scene” (
letter of 20 February 1832 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 262–63]).
Although
Ruskin expected to be scolded for this patchwork approach to invention, but the masterʼs response was that ‘patch[ing] up . . . was not copying’”,
and that “there was something in”
Ruskinʼs picture “that would make him totally change the method he had hitherto pursued with me”. Forthwith,
Runciman
instructed
Ruskin to use watercolor on grey paper, beginning “with a few of the simplest colours, in order to teach me better the effects of light & shade”.
The aim was “to teach me water colour painting, but . . . only as a basis for oil” (
letter of 27 February 1832 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 267].
Paul H. Walton speculates this change in approach signifies that
Runciman “believed that he had encountered a boy who would one day bring lustre to his teacherʼs name through his success as a professional
artist in the exhibitions of the Royal Academy”, but that such ambitions were foiled by the elder
Ruskinsʼ plans of a more gentlemanly profession for their son,
for which “advanced training in the techniques and materials of art” such as oils “would introduce an unnecessary and inappropriate degree of specialization” (9. 11).
In due course, as
Walton points out,
Ruskin came to dislike oil painting, complaining in an
1835 rhymed letter to his father of its smell and messiness. Instead,
“
C. Fieldings tints alone for me“,
Ruskin declared, having begun his lessons with
Copley Fielding in this year, the same year in which he appears to have ended
his instruction with
Runciman (
letter of 11 March 1835 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 312, and see 261 n. 13, 314 n. 3]). If snobbery about an ungentlemanly dirtying
of oneʼs hands was a factor in
Ruskinʼs rejection of
Runcimanʼs course of instruction,
so was the time involved in “some fifty coats to be / Splashed on each spot successively” (
letter of 11 March 1835 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 312]). From the start, however, even when
Ruskin was still
“patching together” his pictures, the quality that perhaps gained
Runcimanʼs attention was a
Wordsworthian combining of memory and spontaneity. When constructing
his first scene for
Runciman,
Ruskin was not entirely copying, because he “thought . . . [his] model resembled” his memory of “the cottage that we saw,
as we went to
Rhaidyr Dhu, near
Maentwrog where the old woman lived whose grandson went with us to the fall, so very silently” (
letter of 20 February 1832 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 262]); and the
painting that he had in prospect to learn from
Runciman seemed to
Ruskin a “superior” art, because he would be able to “carry off
Derwent Water &
Skiddaw
in my pocket” (
letter of 27 February 1832 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 268]). When graduating to
Fieldingʼs instruction,
Ruskin was still looking to capture the ephemeral, “To sketch the scenes that pass me by” in
the “lovely world” of “the heavens high” that remind him of other places, such as an illusory “heap of Alpine snow” over the
Norwood hills (
letter of 11 March 1835 [
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 311, 310]).