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
