Ruskin

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of November 1878, in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, the libel suit Whistler v. Ruskin came up for trial before Baron Huddleston. The American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, forty-four years old, was suing John Ruskin, fifty-nine, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and the English art critic of the nineteenth century, for libel arising from a paragraph in Ruskin's monthly pamphlet Fors Clavigera of July 1877, in which Ruskin had reviewed Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (then on exhibition at the new Grosvenor Gallery) with the line: I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. The trial lasted two days. Ruskin, who had been suffering a long-running mental breakdown since the previous spring, was unable to attend; his was represented by his counsel Sir John Holker QC. Whistler appeared and gave the memorable exchange under cross-examination about how long the Nocturne in Black and Gold had taken him to paint (two days) and what he was charging two hundred guineas for (the knowledge of a lifetime). The jury found for Whistler, but awarded him only one farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages with no costs. Whistler was bankrupted by the legal costs and lost his house at Tite Street in Chelsea; Ruskin resigned the Slade Professorship at Oxford and never returned to public art criticism. The trial is, by every careful judgment of the late-Victorian art-history, the foundational legal-and-cultural moment of modern art-critical thinking.

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