Why Ruskin Matters

John Ruskin (1819–1900), the Victorian age’s foremost art critic, was born 200 years ago this February. In Ruskin and his Contemporaries (2018), a compilation of lectures and articles published to mark the occasion, Robert Hewison observes that ‘Anniversaries are arbitrary affairs’. But perhaps this arbitrariness is less revealing than the kinds of impetus and organisation that bring one anniversary to public attention over any other. Ruskin’s bicentenary has been in the planning for a long time: Ruskin To-Day, a body set up in 1995 to coordinate the centenary of his death, has circulated an impressively varied calendar of events, ranging from public lectures and symposia to exhibitions, student shows, and even a choral evensong. And this activity is not confined to the UK: there will be exhibitions at Harvard’s Houghton Library, at the Yale Center for British Art, and at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo (which travels to Kurume and Osaka), as well as conferences in Venice, Pau, and San Marino. Hewison rightly suggests that anniversaries can bring ‘the past into the present; by making us revisit, and rethink, familiar material’. They also pose questions, as to the warrant for all this attention. Does Ruskin still deserve a place in the present? Is he in any sense our contemporary? And what, if so, is the appropriate balance between celebration and commemoration?

As with many Victorian figures, a pressing concern is what to do with those aspects of a legacy that might trouble or even appal us. Ruskin’s philanthropy was mixed up with the imperialist ferment of Oxford in the 1870s; and his attraction to childhood innocence places him in the company of Lewis Carroll and those ‘men in Wonderland’ whose ‘girlhood’ – to quote Catherine Robson – is hard and uncomfortable to categorise. In his politics and personal relations, he could be humane and kind-hearted, yet also high-handed and authoritarian. Ruskin’s legacy may not be precisely in tune with today’s attitudes, but he also caused a fair amount of outrage in his own time, through public spats with economists, the Anglican clergy, and, most famously, James McNeill Whistler. The more prurient and superficial responses of his contemporaries linger in our own time, as witnessed by the two-dimensional portraits of recent television and film: the BBC’s Desperate Romantics (2009), Emma Thompson’s Effie Gray (2014), and Mike Leigh’s otherwise sensitive Mr. Turner (2014).

Ruskin has remained a figure to reckon with all the same. He was J.M.W. Turner’s earliest and most fervent defender; he inspired aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts movement; he influenced the labour ethics of Tolstoy and Gandhi, and he was a source for the principles of the welfare state. His appeal has been strikingly ecumenical: a self-confessed ‘violent Tory of the old school’, he nevertheless topped a survey of the books most admired by Keir Hardie’s intake of MPs in 1906. Recent years have added new, or renewed, forms of influence. Ruskin’s dark premonition of atmospheric pollution – his Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) – has been largely vindicated. Concerns about plastic pollution in our oceans likewise echo his fretful attention to the cleanliness of rivers and the purity of springs. With the financial crisis of 2008, Ruskin’s much-derided political economy returned to view. Andrew Hill, then city editor of the Financial Times, explored Ruskin’s concept of the ‘honest merchant’, and this month publishes Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World. Others have pondered the relevance of a Latin inscription photographed and favoured by Ruskin, on the exterior of San Giacomo di Rialto, Venice: ‘Around this temple, let the merchant’s law be just – his weights true, and his agreements guileless.’

Binding all these legacies is Ruskin’s appeal to the importance of vision, understood not as passive experience, but as a trainable agent of personal and social transformation. ‘To see clearly,’ he observed, ‘is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one.’ This last association is the focus of ‘Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud: Watercolours and Drawings’ (29 March–23 June), an exhibition at York Art Gallery that explores the connection between Ruskin’s  admiration of Turner and his close visual attention to buildings, mountains, and the weather (the exhibition travels to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, from 11 July–5 October).

The idea of a sustaining and sustainable attentiveness runs through an accompanying essay collection, edited by Suzanne Fagence Cooper and Richard Johns. A chapter by Howard Hull compares modern conceptions of climate change to Ruskin’s account of ‘a very particular type of “plague wind”’ that ‘brought symptoms of sickness, not vitality’. This perspective was informed not only by Romanticism, but by science. Since his youth, explains Hull, Ruskin ‘recorded his observations of the weather methodically, especially the blueness of the sky (of which he took measure with a cyanometer, a device created by the French alpinist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure)’. But the disciplines of Ruskin’s ‘close looking’ could also tip him out of mental balance, so that he found it hard to disentangle change from moral judgement, and environment from menace. Modern history became the record of a fall into faithlessness, while the polluted skies of Ruskin’s maturity warned not just of social malaise, but of a coming brain storm. His most serious mental collapse occurred in 1878. On the night in question he filled his diary with delirious reflections on Venetian history, and imagined himself summoned to combat the devil ‘in a naked condition’. These tribulations took a heavy toll on health and happiness; and yet Ruskin never lost his original sense of wonder in contemplating the created world. Writing as the director of Brantwood, Ruskin’s Lakeland home, Hull rightly returns us to the pictures on the wall of the author’s bedroom, to a set of ‘sun drenched Turners, alive with affection, cheerfulness and honesty: glowing with the warmth of a humanity at one with an earth they both loved’.

A photograph from February 1895, showing Ruskin and his household on the frozen surface of Coniston Water, emits a similar kind of hope. The master appears here in his silent dotage, the torment and struggle over, and the mental powers stilled. And yet the mixture of activity and calm in this image feels consolatory: from the deeply scored ice the eye moves to a boy on skates, and then a gentleman on a primitive tricycle, and finally to Ruskin himself, miraculously seated in the middle of the lake. Commending the same scene in a previous year, Ruskin imagined ‘a marble field, as strong as the floor of Milan Cathedral, half a mile across and four miles down’. Ice had been a preoccupation ever since he pioneered the photography of mountain environments as a young man. A chapter by Robert Macfarlane applauds this aspect of his legacy: Ruskin’s portrait of the Glacier des Bois, he observes, is a ‘paradox of stasis and dramatic force’. Another piece, by the artist Emma Stibbon, presents a daguerreotype, Mer de Glace, Chamonix (1854) – taken by Ruskin and his manservant, Frederick Crawley – alongside her own image of the same spot, captured from the Montenvers observation hut at the same time of year. She finds the valley bare, ‘a dark moraine covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice’. Apart from alerting us to the remarkable extent of glacier melt, Ruskin’s original exposure reveals a photographic eye moving beyond simple landscapes into the abstraction of landscape detail, a kind of fractal awareness. Its subject, an ice field, has peaks and troughs resembling the solid, but slowly ‘perishing’, mountain range through which it passes.

The major exhibition of the year is at Two Temple Place, a late Victorian mansion on the Embankment in London. ‘John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing’ (26 January–22 April) has been conceived by Louise Pullen of Museums Sheffield (the exhibition travels to their Millennium Gallery in May), and by the Guild of St George, which owns many of the works on display. Like the York show, it emphasises an active development of the eyes. But it also moves beyond things seen in the world to encompass Ruskin’s curatorial and museological philosophy, according to which museums were devoted to public access and visual study, not just preservation. At the core of the exhibition is a group of objects that Ruskin lodged in Sheffield, in a small, experimental gallery, perched on a hill within sight of the Peak District. Named St George’s Museum in honour of England’s patron saint, and of the same saint’s veneration in Venice, it announced his ambition for a ‘working man’s Bodleian library’, a treasury of books, minerals, medieval manuscripts, plaster casts and paintings, aimed at the local population of cutlers. Ruskin even designed the museum furniture, ingeniously combining the imperatives of preservation and display to create cases that anticipated modern curatorial methods. His mineral cabinets were lined with baize and topped with angled inspection glass. Straps were attached to wooden fittings for easy lifting, and the frames of paintings were designed ‘to slide into portable boxes’ for safe and efficient loan to other institutions.

The exhibition signals the backdrop of the museum in various ways: Stanley Royle’s Sheffield from Wincobank Wood (1923) visualises the city’s open vistas of chimney and furnace, while a sterling-silver and silver-gilt bracelet  (c. 1940) by Joyce Rosemary Himsworth marks Sheffield’s metal-working heritage. Artisanal processes are the subject of The Putter (2014), a film by Shaun Bloodworth whose title (meaning ‘a putter-togetherer of scissors’) evokes the surviving metallurgical vernacular of Sheffield’s ‘little mesters’ (independent masters). Ruskin, crucially, did not want to turn cutlers into gentlemen. He wished instead to make them better craftsmen, by giving them access to art. He kept this connection in mind even when he showed them Old Masters. ‘The Ruskin Madonna’ (c. 1470) – a work unfortunately not travelling to the exhibition – was sold in 1975 to the National Gallery of Scotland. When Ruskin acquired the painting it was attributed to Verrocchio, an artist whose first training as a goldsmith evoked the museum’s founding purpose as a place where artists and artisans could rediscover common ground.

In practice, social roles proved more mobile than Ruskin might have intended. One day a knife grinder named Benjamin Creswick stepped inside the museum. The experience was transformative: he became a sculptor, and finally master of modelling at the Birmingham School of Art. Major commissions included friezes for the façades of the Cutlers’ Hall, City of London, and at the Bloomsbury Library, Birmingham. Creswick’s story hints at gentrification, but became talismanic for Ruskin all the same, suggesting as it did sudden conversion and a mingling of art and craft at the level of biography. His contribution is aptly evoked in the exhibition by a terracotta bust he made of Ruskin, from 1887, and a terracotta relief entitled The Blacksmith’s Forge (1886). Leading in the opposite direction, a fine edition of Ruskin’s Unto this Last (1860) suggests the possibility of brainworkers becoming handworkers, bound as it was in the 1880s by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, a barrister who turned his attention to bookmaking at the suggestion of William Morris’s wife, Jane.

Many of the museum’s objects were purchased or donated as aids to drawing. Ruskin’s studies of flowers and foliage advance a method of teaching pioneered years earlier in The Elements of Drawing (1857), a work whose observational exercises were developed at London’s Working Men’s College. Laws of perspective receded in favour of a resolve to ‘draw everything by the eye’, a practical instruction that evinced a combination of self-trust and responsibility in faithfully representing the world. Ruskin explained that he ‘would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw’. It followed that the process of observation was as important as its end-product, indeed a faculty worth engaging for its own sake. The exhibition includes his Study of Spray of Dead Oak Leaves and Fast Sketch of Seaweed (Hornwrack) (both 1879), both from the early years of the museum. Each discovers a vitality beyond the usual limits of life: the first, in the delicate rhythm of autumnal oak leaves, and the second in the marine foliage of a ‘seaweed’ actually composed of small organisms, or zooids. Ruskin’s Snake’s-Head Fritillary, from the Ashmolean, and other individual flower portraits isolate a more fleeting beauty. A lack of background wash could suggest a clinical ‘study’, or a merely botanical record; but for Ruskin flowers were never just a means to the end of pollination. He viewed them, rather, as a kind of art, an offering to the human eye requiring no other purpose than beauty. A similar principle of gratuitous display – of tail feather, plumage and beak – emerges from the exhibition’s bird drawings, among them Ruskin’s Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Sketched at Zoo (1877) and Turner’s Head of a Peacock (c. 1815), with its exemplary poise and detail. Ruskin especially valued the skill and decisiveness required for the ‘fast study’ of a shy creature. His eye was drawn to parts otherwise hidden by the whole, as one sees in his sketches of tracery and rock. The same principle applies in Ruskin’s Study of a Peacock’s Breast Feather (1873), and his study of a bird’s foot, a limb floating in white space, but somehow firmly planted.

Ruskin’s education of the eye anticipated later visual practices in important ways. He was the father of classroom ‘observational drawing’; and in recent decades his understanding of drawing as a source of personal wellbeing has inspired the Campaign for Drawing (‘The Big Draw: Drawing Changes Lives’). His methods chime similarly with the meditative simplicity and visual focus encouraged by today’s ‘mindfulness’ movement. Ruskin, equally, did not confine himself to educational or rehabilitative aims: St George’s Museum was also entrusted with work of architectural preservation, and in this arena his reverence for the object also prevailed. Ruskin deposited casts taken from relief carvings on the Doge’s Palace, Venice, alongside detailed drawings of architectural features. They were executed by a trusted team of copyists, sent by him to Italy to produce ‘memorial studies’ of surfaces threatened by insensitive restoration. Works by J.W. Bunney stand out: his Palazzo Manzoni on the Grand Canal, Venice (1871), and Western Façade of the Basilica of San Marco, Venice (1877–82), a large-scale oil that formed the centrepiece of the museum’s rear extension. This part of the museum’s work influenced modern conceptions of buildings’ conservation as a matter of limited intervention, and careful record keeping. More locally, Sheffield became an unlikely resting place for the remains of a slowly vanishing Italian city, a site at which copies acquired something of the aura once reserved for their damaged originals.

Several successful exhibitions have been devoted to Ruskin in recent years. In 2014, ‘Artist and Observer’, a revelatory show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, demonstrated his underrated significance as a watercolourist. ‘John Ruskin: Le Pietre di Venezia’, a major exhibition at the Doge’s Palace last year, explored his contribution to the myth of Venice. As with Ruskin’s draughtsmanship, we can learn much from detailed views of a single attribute. But 2019 promises something much closer to a total view – to an encounter with the startling range and depth of the Ruskinian artistic and social intelligence. Once contemplated in all its variety, Ruskin’s vision crystallises as an undeniable cultural fact. He speaks to us of the past, and from the past, but also of the ways in which past things can be refashioned and recuperated. We may rightly question claims that he persists as a contemporary. Commemoration, at its best, avoids unthinking absorption or blind celebration. Whether or not we endorse his personal vision, Ruskin places a revealing pressure on vision itself. Seeing becomes an ethical faculty, a function as interested in the process as in its end-product. As such it recovers a form of vision hospitable to broader kinds of knowledge and self-awareness. His attention to the world favours innocence over scepticism, and intuition over learned principle; but it also contains its own rigours, privileging as it does what is seen above what we merely think or assume to be there.

How relevant is Ruskin today? By  Marcus Waithe.  Apollo.  February 23, 2019

To find out more about Ruskin bicentenary events worldwide, visit the Ruskin To-Day website.

John Ruskin: 200th Anniversary Celebrated With Year-Long Programme. Artlyst

In 1964, Kenneth Clark set out the problems of loving John Ruskin. One was his fame itself. Like his sometime pupil Oscar Wilde (who, along with other of his Oxford students he persuaded to dig a road in Hinksey in order that they learn the dignity of labour), Ruskin defined the art and culture of his century. “For almost 50 years,” Clark wrote in his book, Ruskin Today, “to read Ruskin was accepted as proof of the possession of a soul.” Gladstone would have made him poet laureate “and was only prevented from doing so by the fact that [Ruskin] was out of his mind”.

Ruskin was a man who believed in angels but championed the most radical British artist of his time. He was a social reformer and utopian who was at heart a conservative reactionary and a puritan. He was a brilliant artist who ought to have been a bishop. He hated trains but invented the blog.

How can it be that a man so celebrated in his time is only fitfully remembered now, 200 years after his birth – and then mostly for a salacious story that he was too intimidated by the sight of his young wife’s pubic hair to perform on his wedding night? He’s a beardy Victorian worthy, preserved in sepia photographs and unread books with inexplicable titles – Unto This Last, Sesame and Lilies, Praeterita – consigned to the top shelves of charity shops.

The problem lies in the fact that Ruskin rejects all those presumptions even in his own lifetime. His watercolours of the natural world – from mosses to Swiss mountains – are astonishing, hyper-real representations of something close to his soul, a metaphysical reality. He declined to join the headlong rush of economic progress and rejected the mores of his class. In the famous portrait of him by John Everett Millais – the Pre-Raphaelite artist who, even as he painted the picture in the Scottish Highlands, was about to seduce Ruskin’s young wife, Effie Gray – he stands on a rock by a waterfall, as if dominating the terrain around him. He looks the picture of Victorian rectitude; but he was undermining the century with his crusade.

His first offence was to champion William Turner’s paintings. Almost intuitively, Ruskin understood the power of what Turner was trying to do. As the contemporary eco-philosopher Timothy Morton says, “art is from the future”; Ruskin saw that futurity in Turner. His second offence was to attack capitalism. As Clark notes, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Bernard Shaw thought him one of the greatest social reformers of his time. When members at the first meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party were asked which book had most influenced them, they answered Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Bernard Shaw pithily summed up Ruskin’s affront to his own class: he told them, “You are a parcel of thieves.”

Art and revolution: Ruskin’s violent social conscience was as absolute as it was paradoxical and sometimes surreal, given that he relied entirely on inherited wealth. In 1874 he set up a tea room in Marylebone in which he hoped to install his beloved Rose La Touche, just one of the young women with whom he fell in love. At the same time he was sending out monthly newsletters to the working man, exhorting him to take note of the work of Albrecht Dürer and blasting the appalling poverty he saw in mid-19th-century Britain. These extraordinary samizdats were the forerunners of the blog – only with more soundbites and psychodrama. “THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE”; “Gunpowder and steam hammers are the toys of the insane and paralytic”; “Meanwhile, at the other end – no, at the very centre of your great Babylon – a son leaves his father dead, and with his head, instead of a fire, in the fireplace…”

Ruskin was, after all, brought up to be a priest; he delivered his first sermon to the family as a young child – it began, “People, be good.” His parents were of Scottish descent and in trade – his father a sherry merchant and his mother the daughter of a publican. But they had money and travelled around Europe in a custom-built coach; Ruskin remembered that it had comfortably rounded corners to its interior woodwork.

These trips were the means of Ruskin’s epiphany: when he saw the Alps, his life changed. He knew the importance of art – in its record of nature. He went up to Oxford, but his mother came too – they took tea together every evening. In his late teens he fell in love with Adèle-Clotilde Domecq, daughter of one of his father’s partners, but her Catholicism meant a match was impossible. Ruskin turned for consolation to his love of the works of Turner, whom he met in 1840. The feeling wasn’t mutual; the painter actually preferred the company of Ruskin’s father, having been freaked out by John’s description of him as “the great angel of the apocalypse”.

It was the birth of the named, as opposed to anonymous, art critic. But the “strange afflatus” in those blue eyes (he customarily wore a blue silk stock to reinforce the effect) betrayed an incipient instability. “Genius is made more comprehensible by a medical diagnosis,” Clark wrote, noting that Ruskin probably suffered from manic depression.

A semi-arranged marriage to Effie Gray was never going to work. She had no interest in being the domestic wife Ruskin wanted, and she didn’t appear to excite him sexually either – although the notion that he had been aghast at her pubic hair now seems to be a smear. Tim Hilton, author of the best biography of Ruskin, suggests that Effie may have been menstruating on their wedding night; he also sees Ruskin’s offer to divorce his wife and sacrifice his own reputation as the act of a gentleman.

Ruskin followed this disaster with his infatuation with Rose La Touche. She was ten when they met; he was 38. Their pathetic story ended in her early death, problably from anorexia, and his insanity. Ruskin withdrew into his madness; his genius was withdrawn from us. He died on 20 January 1900, as if to end the century himself.

You can still visit the turret of Ruskin’s bedroom, from which he looked out one night over Coniston Water and lost his mind. Brantwood, the house that Ruskin bought in 1871 and extended into a gothic pile, hangs darkly over the still lake. It is a somewhat Wagnerian scenario; you can even arrive by a gilded steam gondola.

It was from this eyrie that Ruskin had continued his utopian experiments. He created a hillside garden as a simulacrum of the natural world with which he so empathised, as though it were a reflection of his own body, the human physicality he could never reconcile with his dreams, with the spirit world or the even more intense world of aesthetics. He decried the craze for gothic – which he knew he had partly inspired, but which had resulted in the replication of a million gothicised suburban villas – as a personal betrayal of his vision of The Stones of Venice. His Guild of St George called for England’s renewal in colonies in the countryside. Workers would be paid fair wages and taught music, art and morality, along with “gentleness to all brute animals. It is not to be Communism,” he insisted, “[but] the old Feudal system applied to do good instead of evil.”

All this was directed from Brantwood, his northern palazzo, where he waited for the ominous storm-cloud of the 19th century to drift from the industrial oppression of Manchester and Bradford. He would row out into the middle of the lake and lie on his back looking at the sky, or play his self-invented stone xylophone, another physical evocation of the hard landscape, turning the Lake District into a musical instrument.

None of this kept the madness away. He dabbled with mesmerism. In Venice he felt the ghost of Rose La Touche, like a pre-echo of Don’t Look Now. He engaged mediums and summoned La Touche in seances, and saw her coming to him, in marriage, with Joan of Arc as their priest.

You may also come face to face with Ruskin’s ferocious intelligence at a new exhibition, The Power of Seeing, at London’s Two Temple Place – a selection of Ruskin’s works gathered in the grand mock-medieval interior built for William Waldorf Astor as his estate office.

Curated with Museums Sheffield and the Guild of St George, which carries Ruskin’s torch into the modern world, The Power of Seeing displays, beautifully and intimately, the artist’s evanescent watercolours and fugitive daguerreotypes (he copied them on vast posters so that his audience “might not be plagued in looking, by the lustre”). They are set alongside works by Turner, as well as diaries, plaster casts and two bizarre giant wooden birds’ feathers – like enormous quill pens – created as props for Ruskin’s public lectures by the taxidermist and animal preserver WF Davis.

The exhibition evokes the overstuffed museum that Ruskin installed at Walkley, outside Sheffield, supervised by one of his acolytes, Henry Swan – spiritualist, vegetarian and boomerang thrower – who “lectured visitors as if he were the speaking voice of Ruskin’s own books”. But then, his own master’s eccentric crusades still reverberate, as he declared himself – in his Scottish burr – to be against cycling, which joined train travel as one of the blasphemies of modern society: “I not only object, but am quite prepared to spend all my best ‘bad language’ in reprobation of the bi-, tri- and four-, five-, six-, or seven-cycles…”

Perhaps most moving is a corner dedicated to Ruskin’s worship of Dürer – Albert, as he called him, confidingly. The German artist’s enigmatic engraving Melencolia I hangs as kind of memento mori of Ruskin’s own melancholy. Yet that same instability turned his lectures into electric performances worthy of Joseph Beuys. Ruskin waved around his giant flowers and leaves like pop-art icons, and would strut across the stage in imitation of one of the birds whose beauty he was extolling, demonstrating its flapping wings with his cape.

These events were sell-out occasions, but whether people attended for their moral education or to witness the extreme behaviour of someone who was clearly mentally unwell, it is not easy to say. Set this furore against the quietness of his nature studies and you feel Ruskin’s beautiful, wanton mind: in a piece of frozen seaweed, a microcosmic vista of lichens and ferns as if lit by the moon; or a bit of crumbling brick with moss growing on it, rendered in such detail that it hurtles towards you like an asteroid. It now seems like the last of England, this exquisite art, somehow symbolic of Ruskin’s synoptic, apocalyptic aesthetic.

In her brilliant little book – published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Ruskin’s birth – To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters (Quercus), art historian Suzanne Fagence Cooper makes plain why he does. Ruskin saw more clearly than most – more clearly than most critics, especially – because he was an artist. He believed that just as anyone can learn mathematics or another language, so they can draw; it was only a matter of practice – and of looking.

He was, after all, a man who thought nothing of spending five hours just looking at the sea (he even upbraided Turner for being too conventional; the artist’s water wasn’t wet enough) and who religiously made sure he witnessed the sun rise and set every day. Ruskin exhorted pupils to draw a stone: not to start with an outline of it, but to look at the way the light fell and render those patches in impressions of its stoneliness. “Now if you can draw the stone rightly,” he said, “everything within reach of art is also within yours.”

The art historian Robert Hewison observed that Ruskin’s puritanical religion directed him away from the problematic human body into the natural world; hence Mike Leigh’s portrayal of the critic in his 2014 biopic Mr Turner as a simpering, sexless thing. But Ruskin is far more than a nature lover. He is a man who could see a mountain in a stone and make us believe it. We need him more than ever as we find ourselves evermore distanced from the world. At the height of his art and his humanity, Ruskin brings us vertiginously, exquisitely closer to what really matters. There is no wealth but life. 

John Ruskin: a prophet for our troubled times. By  By Philip Hoare. New Statesman  , February 13, 2019.

Art critic, geologist, botanist, Alpinist, architectural theorist and social reformer – maybe even revolutionary – John Ruskin gazes with troubled intensity from a watercolour portrait that dates from when he was on the verge of losing his mind. Half his face is in shadow, the other in mountain sunlight. His blue-green eyes stare almost too intently. There’s something wrong behind them. The following year, over Christmas 1876 in his beloved Venice, Ruskin would start to hallucinate. Breakdowns would follow and he eventually withdrew from the world, cared for at home on a healthy inheritance from his wine merchant father, until his death in 1900.

Ruskin’s manic portrait, attributed to Charles Fairfax Murray but quite possibly the critic’s own work, fits well into the late-Victorian interior of Two Temple Place, laden with rich wooden carvings, panelling and stained glass. Or does it? It’s safe to say its architect was influenced by Ruskin’s gothic vision of architecture. Yet it’s an equally safe guess that Ruskin would have loathed it, for this neo-Tudor fantasy was created for the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor. In his book The Stones of Venice, the bible of the gothic revival, Ruskin denounces the very opulence and selfishness this building represents. Medieval gothic, for him, is an art of communal togetherness, created by a morally superior age that respected honest work and condemned capitalist usury.

And there, in a nutshell, is the reason for today’s Ruskin revival. In the late 20th century, Ruskin was considered a bit of a joke. Even now, his name for many people evokes a sexually repressed Victorian oddball. Even the curators of this loving homage can’t resist telling us how working-class audiences laughed at his “megaphone” lecturing voice and quirky bird imitations. Yet as the deepest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s drags on and Victorian critics of the cash nexus, from Karl Marx to William Morris, are taken seriously once more, Ruskin’s social radicalism looks urgent again. He was ahead of them all. In 1860, he horrified readers of the Cornhill magazine with a series of articles that denounced free-market economics. The myth of a grasping homo economicus, he argued, is a fundamental misconception of human nature. Marx’s Das Kapital would not appear until seven years later.

At the heart of this celebration of Ruskin’s 200th anniversary – he was born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria – is a telling story of his generous, ardent spirit. In 1875, Ruskin created a museum for the people of Sheffield. The north remembers: this show has been created by Sheffield’s museums together with the Ruskinian Guild of St George. Art, Ruskin believed, was for everyone. And everyone needs it. The industrial working class deserved not just bread but beauty. The most beautiful thing in this exhibition, however, is not a work of art. It’s the collection of minerals Ruskin presented to his people’s museum. These gorgeous rocks set this exhibition alight with their strong colours and brilliant crystal facets: purple amethyst, snow-white quartz, bubbling haematite.

He created his little museum in a former cottage in Walkley, between Sheffield and its surrounding countryside, to draw working folk out of the smoky town to explore nature. For Ruskin, the natural world was sacred. To be in it was to be enraptured, transformed, redeemed. His responses to the natural are on display in his drawings and watercolours of glaciers and mossy riverbanks, wildflowers and a bright blue peacock feather. His eye for nature can be enthralling, especially when he homes in on strange gothic patterns and textures. His Study of Moss, Fern and Wood-Sorrel, Upon a Rocky River Bank is a mesmerising portrayal of green life entwined in the ancient scars and turbulent strata of a steep rocky mass.

Here is another way Ruskin suddenly looks contemporary again. There are new images of nature among the Victorian drawings, including a chilling digital analysis of the changing forms of Alpine glaciers by Dan Holdsworth. Ruskin knew nothing of global warming, but his passionate belief in the preciousness of nature comes through in his awestruck Turneresque watercolour of Vevey in the Alps, with its sapphire, immemorial mountains.

What the show can’t fully reveal, because it is hidden by the precision of his drawings, is the tragedy of Ruskin’s passion for nature. Brought up as an evangelical Christian, shaped by the glories of art and nature he saw on childhood trips in Europe, his vocation as a young man was to teach his contemporaries to see the divinely created beauty of the world. “I have to prove to them ... that the truth of nature is part of the truth of God,” he wrote. As those lovely rocks in this exhibition show, geology was at the heart of his theocratic scientific vision. Yet geology in the 19th century was the very science that was demolishing god, fossil by fossil. By 1851, he could hear the geologists’ hammers chipping away his faith: “…those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”

 Ruskin’s scientific honesty devastated his Christian belief and that may have helped to destroy his reason. His calm drawings disguise a turbulence that was tearing him apart. His socialism, too, emerged in the later part of his life. In the Victorian hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, the social order is seen as divinely appointed. But if there’s no God, Ruskin saw, why should the poor wait at the rich man’s gate?

This exhibition is a timely reminder of the tortured genius of the most complex and gifted art critic who ever lived – although it shows how inadequate any label is for this lofty soul.

John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing review - oddball or visionary? By Jonathan Jones. The Guardian , January  24, 2019. 

For John Ruskin (1819–1900), fine art is created when ‘the hand, the head and the heart’ work well together. This spring museums and galleries across the UK are celebrating Ruskin’s 200th birthday. A wealth of exhibitions, lectures and workshops will bring his visionary criticism and joyful watercolours to fresh audiences. From his close encounters with Turner’s paintings, to the prophetic observations of climate change recorded in his cloudscapes, Ruskin transforms the way we look at the world.

Ruskin knew that looking can make us ask how something is made. Or who made it? Or why? Seeing the ground beneath our feet or the sky above helps us to feel part of an intricate network of living things – what Ruskin would call Creation. And it was not just the plants and animals that drew his attention. For him, the flow of water through a landscape, the channels cut by a stream and even the rocks of the stream bed were filled with possibilities for beauty and storytelling. His first love was geology, and he was always searching for the deep history of river valleys, the movements of glaciers or the upswelling of mountains.

This desire to look closely at the workings of nature began early, as he describes in his autobiography. His Scottish aunt ‘had a garden full of gooseberry-bushes’ that sloped ‘down to the Tay, with a door opening to the water, which ran past it clear-brown over the pebbles three or four feet deep; an infinite thing for a child to look down into’. The constant swift motion, the tumbling stones, above all the sense of freedom, combined to make this long-looking a greater delight. And he takes us with him, so that we can almost taste the sharpness of the gooseberries and feel the lap of the water at our fingertips. With close observation, Ruskin knows what is most important about this scene. He brings into focus the small boy, squatting on the steps, alive to the small enchantments of a quiet scene. He saw it at the time. He could recreate it in his mind’s eye nearly 50 years later. And he can bring it back for us, with all its immediacy.

Throughout his life, Ruskin loved the movement of water. As an old man, he built cascades behind his house at Brantwood, and as a young man, he could happily spend ‘four or five hours every day in simply staring and wondering at the sea – an occupation which never failed me till I was forty.’ And so he began to understand how water changed everything it touched, from the green edges of a river bank to the rigging of a boat. He noticed things that other people missed. This made him an extraordinarily perceptive art critic.

He was also a generous mentor, encouraging young artists, like John Everett Millais and Elizabeth Siddal. He championed the intimate paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, who seemed to fulfil his desire that ‘Nothing must come between Nature and the artist’s sight; nothing between God and the artist’s soul’. He donated many of his beloved Turner drawings and watercolours to museums around the country so that students and working people could have access to the best examples of British art. He promoted lifelong learning. He helped young men and women to discover their own talents for drawing, with his step-by-step guide.

Ruskin began his Elements of Drawing by stepping outside: ‘I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature,’ he explained, ‘than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw’. He gives us the tools to ‘to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be described in words’. And he shows us how to ‘preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or which you must yourself leave.'

So over the coming months, as we celebrate Ruskin’s writings and paintings, he will again help us to see new and wonderful details in the world around us. He can guide through grand pictures by Turner or Burne-Jones, unravelling their myths and complexities. Or he can stand beside us as we enjoy the small pleasures of a leaf, a petal, a pebble. As he said, ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion – all in one.’

  

To see clearly: why Ruskin matters. By Suzanne Cooper . Art UK,  February  8, 2019.

The book  : To See Clearly : Why Ruskin Matters by Suzanne Fagence Cooper. Quercus Books