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Lot 104

RUSKIN (JOHN)
Autograph letter signed ("J Ruskin"), to Kate Agnew ("My dear Miss Agnew"), sending her some samples of window-design, Denmark Hill, 8 January 1866

25 March 2015, 11:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

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RUSKIN (JOHN)

Autograph letter signed ("J Ruskin"), to Kate Agnew ("My dear Miss Agnew"), sending her some samples of window-design: "Alas – it was not 'to morrow' nor the day after, that I went to look for windows for you, and when I did – I found I had given away nearly every pattern of the kind of any use I had by me. Here are a very few – sent to day, merely to show the way in which, in the best times of glass design, architecture Is treated always as a flat and ornamental part of the window-mosaic; never pictorially. A picture is one thing and a window another, and I have always set my face steadily against the modern attempts to confuse the two: so that I am quite helpless in a question of design like this: but this sketch which I return is so clever and fine in taste that I doubt not its author can arrange the matter to everybody's liking"; autograph envelope, stamped and postmarked, 3 pages, engraved heading, 8vo, Denmark Hill, 8 January 1866

Footnotes

'A PICTURE IS ONE THING AND A WINDOW ANOTHER' – AN ESSAY ON AESTHETICS BY RUSKIN, delivered to his young cousin, Kate Agnew. The recipient was sister of Joan Agnew (later Severn), who had come to live with Ruskin as a seventeen year old in 1864 and was to remain until his death in 1900. Kate was to marry Arbuthnot Simson in 1867, and die in childbirth two years later. In a postscript to our letter, Ruskin tells her: "Joan is very good just now – but people say she's not looking well, and I don't think being good agrees with her. Write to her and tell her to be mischievous again".

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