John Ruskin, was repulsed when, after the death of his hero, painter J.M.W. Turner, he discovered that Turner had painted an “enormous cache of Turner material” that was comprised of “sketches of naked women and nudes of both sexes in erotic entanglements . . . most likely inspired by Turner’s trips to brothels and other places of ill repute.” Legend has it that Ruskin “was so horrified by the erotic drawings” that “he burned them on a bonfire.” However now, says Sarah Lyall in a New York Times story, Ian Warrell, “a Turner expert and curator at the Tate Britain, says that a painstaking trawl through Turner’s work has led him to conclude that most, if not all, the erotic art still remains in the collection and that the bonfire, said to have occurred in 1858, almost certainly never happened.” Or, as Lyall puts it, “like the similarly titillating tale that attributes Ruskin’s failure to consummate his marriage to his revulsion at the sight of his bride’s pubic hair, the story might not be true.”