On 2 March 2007 The Guardian newspaper reported the saving by the Tate Gallery and the British public of Joseph Mallord William Turner's ‘The Blue Rigi’. Painted in Switzerland in 1842 the small late watercolour, one in a series of three depicting the mountain from the shore of Lake Lucerne, was about to be lost to a foreign buyer. But thanks to a heritage lottery grant, a pledge from the Tate itself, and the generous donations of individuals, the required 4.95 million pounds was raised to maintain the unassuming national ‘treasure’. While the work now remains in public hands in the UK, Turner's companion paintings ‘The Red’ and ‘The Dark Rigi’, depicting different atmospheric conditions of the same prospect, will continue to belong respectively to the National Gallery of Melbourne and a private UK collector. As the fate of ‘The Blue Rigi’ demonstrates, the singular legacy of Turner is today without doubt; the aesthetic and material worth of his relatively modest-sized works on paper are largely unchallenged. But for the celebrated nineteenth century art critic and theorist John Ruskin, however, this scenario would have been quite different. By a curious clairvoyance Ruskin's diary entry, made seven years before Turner's painting, visualizes for us in advance ‘The Blue Rigi’ with its ‘hobbletehoy’-coloured mountain. Yet, still the ongoing battle Ruskin fought during his lifetime to ensure enduring critical appreciation of Turner's work remains easily overlooked So too does the significance of Ruskin's support for the Pre- Raphaelites, that legendary group of initially seven painters and writers: John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, who established a brotherhood in London in 1848.

Though by no means on the same scale as his championing of Turner, Ruskin's support for the Pre-Raphaelites in letters to The Times in the early 1850s is on a continuum with his well-known defence of the artist.