The great critic and writer John Ruskin (1819-1900) had a considerable appetite for the drama of nature, most notably the scenery of the Alps. He also developed uncommon skill in their depiction, as draughtsman and watercolourist. This encouraged him to see with a painter’s eye, which accounts at least in part for the authority of his writings on art, as he came to realize that painting was ‘entirely independent of the representation of facts’, and that good colour owed everything to ‘abstract qualities and relations’. These radical insights brought him to a passionate advocacy of Turner, another spirit in advance of his era