ABSTRACT
Ruskin and Millais spent the summer of 1853 together at Glenfinlas in the Trossachs. There, under Ruskin's strict supervision, Millais produced a pic ture which, they planned, would revolutionize British landscape painting and portraiture. Their ambitious friendship, which was to end so disastrously at the close of the following year, had begun soon after the critic came to the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites in letters to The Times in May 1831. On 2 July that year, Millais wrote that he and Ruskin 'are such good friends that he wishes me to accompany him to Switzerland this summer'. He adds: 'We are as yet singularly at variance in our opinions upon Art. One of our differences is about Turner.'1 The mention of Switzerland, Turner and differences is significant. Ruskin was anxious to reconcile and develop his apparently contradictory and controversial championships of Turner and of the young Pre-Raphaelites. He thought he could achieve this by introducing the Pre-Raphaelites to mountain scenery of the kind painted by Turner, central to his own aesthetic, hence his stay with Millais at Glenfinlas.
