84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for Mr. Ruskin tells us that " dust of thirty years' accumulation, black, 

 dense, and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed and crumpled edges 

 of these flattened bundles." There were also numbers of pocket 

 sketching-books "dropping to pieces at the back, tearing laterally 

 whenever opened, and every drawing rubbing itself into the one oppo- 

 site." 



What strikes us most in this disorder is not so much the deteriora- 

 tion of the sketches and drawings, which Turner possibly may not 

 have foreseen, as the intolerable inconvenience of a system that must 

 have made reference so difficult for the artist himself as to be always 

 tedious and often impossible. A collection of studies should always 

 be so arranged that any study whatever, even down to the most tri- 

 fling memorandum, may be found at a moment's notice. The care of 

 an artist's collection of studies is not, however, the subject of the 

 present paper, which is addressed rather to the lay possessors of works 

 of art than to professional artists. 



Turner's way of keeping his drawings is a model of everything 

 that the collector ought to avoid. Nobody but an artist would think 

 of keeping drawings rolled up in bundles, for the simple reason that 

 you can never see a drawing properly unless it lies flat. Then we 

 learn that Turner exposed his collection to every one of the enemies 

 that a prudent keeper provides against. These enemies are damp, 

 dust, and vermin. In the case of water-color and oil pictures there 

 are two other foes, light and darkness, a water-color being liable to 

 fade in the light, and an oil-picture to turn yellow for the want of it. 



Damp and mildew are often spoken of as two enemies, but in fact 

 they are only one, as mildew is a fungus or collection of fungi thriv- 

 ing only in damp situations.* Damp, as everybody knows, is retained 

 moisture, or, in other words, water diffused in minute particles that 

 are held by some other substance so as to be prevented from joining 

 each other and flowing away, while they do not get access to the air 

 so as to be carried off by evaporation. Some substances are extremely 

 favorable to the retention of damp, and it so happens that the mill- 

 board commonly employed by framers to put behind prints, and by 

 book-binders who make portfolios, is one of those substances which ab- 

 sorb and retain damp with particular facility. It is employed by cop- 

 per-plate printers to dry impressions, which are placed between sheets 

 of mill-board under pressure, the boards soon drinking up the water 

 contained in the wetted paper. The ingenuity of framers has led 

 them to select this (of all substances in the world) to put behind 

 engravings that are hung up on walls ; and, when the walls happen to 

 be damp, it follows as a matter of course that the engravings are 

 spoiled by mildew or rust-spot. If the reader has ever lived in a 



* So far as I know. My experience of mildew has been chiefly with prints and the 

 sails of boats, which require almost as much care as prints, and in these cases mildew has 

 always required damp as a condition of its existence. 



