ABSTRACT
The phrase The art of seeing' - borrowed from an advertising blurb discussing Ruskin's views on visual culture and visual language - describes the Victorian approach to observation and a Victorian passion for refining the skills of looking. The phrase also helps to relate looking and seeing to the sister-arts tradition, a tradition loosely associated w ith the notion of the 'pen ' and 'pencil' and prevalent throughout the nineteenth century. Ruskin best staked the claim for the superiority of the 'art of seeing' when he noted that
the first distinct impression which fixed itself on me was that of the entire superiority of Painting to Literature as a test, expression, and record of human intellect, and of the enormously greater quantity of Intellect which might be forced into a picture - and read there - compared with that which might be expressed in words.1
