Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

St. Maurice, a copy by M.r. Ward of the most beautiful of the vignettes to the Italy. Nothing is finer in the whole range of Turner’s works than the original drawing, and I should never end if I began talking about it. I should probably, nevertheless, have begun and not ended, if I were not brought to pause by my entire inability to find excuse for a fault which, unless I advised him of it, the student would probably not have found out, but which in honour I cannot conceal, that the Rhone runs the wrong way. It might indeed have been long before this audacity - for it is not an error - had been detected; for the railroad passes the R. scene in a tunnel, and not one traveller in a thousand ever sees either the bridge or the river; but before this record of one quite the greatest among the works of human art, I am bound to acknowledge whatever can be justly alleged against it. The facts are that, from the beginning to the end of his life, Turner’s object was never to give literal or geographical account of anything, but to perpetuate the mental impression he had himself received from it. That impression at St. Maurice had depended on the aspect of the bridge seen from this side and on the rapidity of the Massy river that rushed beneath it, but not in the least on the quarter of the compass to which its current was directed. He felt himself unable to express its power in looking down stream and chose therefore to represent the bridge behind it and the river in front. I do not justify this, but if Turner had always done right, his country and the world lon would long ago have known that he did, and there would have been no occasion for any author of Modern Painters.