ABSTRACT
As part of his thirteenth-birthday celebrations in 1832, John Ruskin was given a copy of the recently published new edition of Samuel Rogers's Italy, embel lished with steel-engraved vignettes by J. M. W. Turner. The impact of the illustrations on Ruskin was immediate, and their influence was to last a lifetime:' I had no sooner cast eyes on the Rogers vignettes than I took them for my only masters, and set myself to imitate them as far as I possibly could' (35.79). Four years later the young Ruskin was goaded into writing a reply to an unfavourable review in Blackwood's Magazine of Turner's Juliet and Her Nurse, but was dissuaded from publication after correspondence with Turner himself. By 1839 the Ruskins had bought their first Turner watercolour. The following year Ruskin met Turner, and the artist was soon to become a family friend, regularly invited to Ruskin's birthday parties. 1843 saw the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters. These are the beginnings of a lifetime's involvement with Turner and his work: an involvement in which Ruskin's multifaceted role as disciple, collector, patron, apologist, and interpreter, was to undergo many changes and shifts of emphasis.
