Ruskin · 1878
Ruskin versus Whistler
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.
It is twenty past ten on the morning of the twenty-sixth of November 1878, the second day of the trial, in Court Three of the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, in pale autumn light through the high east windows. He is forty-four years old. He is James Abbott McNeill Whistler, born at Lowell, Massachusetts, on the eleventh of July 1834, son of George Washington Whistler the railway engineer and Anna Matilda McNeill of North Carolina, in his fourteenth year of permanent expatriate residence in London, in the dock as the prosecutor.
He is in a long black frock-coat over the yellow waistcoat that is the visual signature of his public appearances. He has, in his hand, the copy of Fors Clavigera of July 1877 with the libelled paragraph marked.
Sir John Holker QC, the Attorney-General and Ruskin's counsel, is cross-examining him from the barrister's table. The line of cross-examination has, in the previous twenty minutes, established the painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (a six-and-a-half-by-five-foot oil of fireworks over the Thames at Cremorne Gardens, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in July 1877 with a price-tag of two hundred guineas, the equivalent of about £25,000 in 2025 money) was the work of an artist who had been formally trained at the Imperial Academy at St Petersburg, the École Imperiale at Paris, and the Académie Suisse, and who had, in the exhibition catalogue, listed the painting at the two-hundred-guinea price.
Holker asks, by the court report of the Times the next morning: the labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas? Whistler replies: no. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime. The court, by the Times, applauds. The judge, Baron Huddleston, threatens to clear the court.
The jury, after five hours of deliberation on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, found for Whistler on the legal question (that the line in Fors Clavigera was a libel) and awarded him one farthing in damages, the smallest coin of the realm. The judge awarded no costs to either side. Whistler had run up legal costs of about £1,500 on his own side; he was bankrupted, sold the White House at Tite Street in Chelsea (the E. W. Godwin-designed studio-house he had built in 1877) at auction in May 1879, and went to Venice for fourteen months to recover by making etchings on commission.
John Ruskin had been in private mental collapse since the previous April. The trial was conducted in his absence by Holker. Ruskin, by the letter to Henry Acland of December 1878, would not have been able to face Whistler in the witness-box if I had been compelled to. He resigned the Slade Professorship at Oxford on the eighteenth of December 1878 by formal letter, I cannot hold a Chair from which I have no power of expressing judgement without being taken before the magistrates. He never returned to public art criticism. The later Ruskin essays were on political economy, social reform, and the Lakeland countryside; the late Whistler career produced the Peacock Room (1876–77), the Mother (1871, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1), and the Ten O'Clock Lecture (1885) which is the aesthetic-theoretical reply to Ruskin.
The painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket is in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, in the American-museum collection since 1946. The legal-cultural consequence of Whistler v. Ruskin is, by every twentieth-century art-historian, the foundational case-law of modern art criticism: the principle that the price an artist charges for a work is the artist's matter of professional judgment and not subject to public-critical demolition by the standards of finished labour. The case is the reading at the first-year Bar examination of the modern art-libel and intellectual-property syllabus.