Ruskin thought his new bride Effie was ‘deformed’ (masculine?) for having pubic hair when he saw her on their wedding night; it was thus never consummated. It was believed that he destroyed a cache of erotic artwork left to him by his mentor J.M.W.Turner who wanted them to be made public after his death. Apparently he just hid them away. Maybe it’s the things that artists wanted to have known posthumously that relatives, for good or ill, chose to suppress, that have had the most deleterious effect on history.
We presently think that sexual orientation and political affiliation give clues to an artists work. Such things may just be red herrings, tantalizing, but easily misunderstood between the respective ages in question. Even given the facts we don’t always draw the most reasonable conclusions. Diarists may have kept personal secrets; or perhaps they just didn’t want their processes and half formed thoughts and sketches available for strangers to paw over.

Not destroyed but never developed. I wish that Tolstoy had gone on to write The Decembrists after War and Peace. He began writing it before W & P, but wanting to trace the origins of the Decembrist revolution, he concentrated on the Napoleonic era. Pierre Bezukhov surely would have been a Decembrist.