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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2012
Professor Ruskin, to please some of his friends who could not obtain admission to his Oxford lectures, repeated to them this week, in a private house at Kensington, much of what he had said as Slade Professor on the merits of Miss Kate Greenaway; but he gave his hearers, besides, the pleasant surprise of finding in Miss Francesca Alexander, some of whose drawings were exhibited, an artist whom we may take to be a good exemplar of Professor Ruskin's lifelong teaching. Slightly altering their application to Miss Greenaway, his words express so well what these drawings appear to us to do, that we venture to quote them:—“The beauty of them is being like. They are blissful just in the degree that they are natural; and the fairyland” (or, in Miss Alexander's case, the spiritual land) “she creates for you is not beyond the sky, nor beneath the sea, but nigh you, even at your doors. She does but show you how to see it and how to cherish. Long since I told you this great law of noble imagination. It does not create, it does not even adorn: it does but reveal the treasures to be possessed by the spirit.”
And these drawings by “Francesca” go far, by their power of truth and grace, to reveal to us Professor Ruskin's meanings.
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