Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.  He had classed them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and Michelangelo and Velasquez.  He was a humorist, not without boyish delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the “drolls,” until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against them.  He was a chiaroscurist, and not naturally offended by their violent light and shade, until George Richmond showed him the more excellent way in colour, the glow of Venice, first hinting it at Rome in 1840, and then proving it in London in the spring of 1842 from Samuel Rogers’ treasures, of which the chief (now in the National Gallery) was the “Christ appearing to the Magdalen.”

Much as the author of “Modern Painters” owed to these friends and teachers, and to the advantages of his varied training, he would never have written his great work without a further inspiration.  Harding’s especial forte was his method of drawing trees.  He looked at Nature with an eye which, for his period, was singularly fresh and unprejudiced; he had a strong feeling for truth of structure as well as for picturesque effect, and he taught his pupils to observe as well as to draw.  But in his own practice he rested too much on having observed; formed a style, and copied himself if he did not copy the old masters; Hence he held to rules of composition and conscious graces of arrangement; and while he taught naturalism in study, he followed it up with teaching artifice in practice.

Turner, who was not a drawing-master, lay under no necessity to formulate his principles and stick to them.  On the contrary, his style developed like a kaleidoscope.  He had been in Switzerland and on the Rhine in 1841, “painting his impressions,” making water-colour notes from memory of effects that had struck him.  From one of these, “Spluegen,” he had made a finished picture, and now wished to get commissions for more of the same class.  Ruskin was greatly interested in this series, because they were not landscapes of the ordinary type, scenes from Nature squeezed into the mould of recognised artistic composition, nor, on the other hand, mere photographic transcripts; but dreams, as it were, of the mountains and sunsets, in which Turner’s wealth of detail was suggested, and his knowledge of form expressed, together with the unity which comes of the faithful record of a single impression.

The lesson was soon enforced upon Ruskin’s mind by example.  One day, while taking his student’s constitutional, he noticed a tree-stem with ivy upon it, which seemed not ungraceful, and invited a sketch.  As he drew he fell into the spirit of its natural arrangement, and soon perceived how much finer it was as a piece of design than any conventional rearrangement would be.  Harding had tried to show him how to generalize foliage; but in this example he saw that not generalization was needed to get its beauty, but truth.