The Guild of St George's annual magazine, The Companion 2020

THE COMPANION No.19

The Magazine of The Guild of St George

Ruskin

200

2020

John Ruskin and The Guild of St George JOHN RUSKIN was one of the most remarkable critics, philosophers and thinkers of the 19th century, and his influence is still a potent one, 2oo years after his birth. He made his name with his first book Modern Painters, begun at the age of 24. But he also wrote and lectured about nature and architecture, craftsmanship, geology, botany, Greek myths, education—a dizzying variety of subjects. He was also a noted artist. Among the people he influenced were Proust, Tolstoy, William Morris, Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius; Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore.

THE GUILD OF St GEORGE is an educational charity founded by Ruskin in 1871 to make England a happier and more beautiful place in which to live and work. Ruskin’s aims and aspirations for the Guild are contained in the ninety-six letters “to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain” he published between 1871 and 1884 under the title, Fors Clavigera. The Guild is devoted to the arts, crafts and the rural economy, and presents regular events, lectures, collaborations and projects in the UK and internationally. It owns a land-holding, Ruskin Land, in the Wyre Forest, and owns and supports the Ruskin Collection in Sheffield. The Guild sometimes collaborates with partners – for example, The Big Draw (which it founded in 2000 as The Campaign for Drawing), a project which encourages drawing for everyone. In recent years it has also created forums for the discussion of Ruskinian ideas and practices in modern contexts. Symposia on craftsmanship, the environment, education and economics have attracted engaged audiences. Similar events have taken place under the Guild’s auspices in the United States, Canada and Italy.

THE GUILD currently has more than 300 Companions. They come from all walks of life, and vary greatly in their areas of expertise, geographical location and age. What they share is a sympathy for the aims of the Guild and a common interest in Ruskin and his ideas. The Guild includes many of the world’s most respected Ruskin scholars, but the true value of the Companionship is its diversity, including artists, makers, thinkers, writers, enthusiasts, academics, neighbourhood activists, collectors, poets, farmers, ecologists and environmentalists, among others. The Guild publishes books and this annual Companion. They can be bought from the online bookshop on the Guild website, which also contains more information about Ruskin and the Guild: www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk THE SYMBOL of the Guild, St George slaying the dragon, is derived from a Ruskin drawing of a picture by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio.

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THE COMPANION NO 19 CONTENTS

The Guild of St George Directors/Trustees : Peter Burman Carolyn Butterworth Rachel Dickinson (Master) Chris Harris (Treasurer) John Iles Nichola Johnson Howard Hull Peter Miller Jenny Robbins Staff: Martin Green, Administrator Ruth Nutter, Creative Producer Simon Seligman, Communications and Membership

Letter from the New Master p2 Ten Years as Master: Clive Wilmer

p4

Tributes to an Old Master

p6

News and Notes p8 Brantwood Bronze, Whitelands May Day Festival, Malcolm Hardman, Bill Mayer, Bob Steele, David Walker Barker, Brian Walker, A Great Community.

A Year of Wonders

p12

For general enquiries, please contact Martin Green enquiries@guildofstgeorge.org.uk

The Hills Are Alive Dan Holdsworth and Emma Stibbon

The Companion is typeset mainly in Bell, designed by Richard Austin in 1788, and in Rockwell, designed by the Monotype Corporation in the 1930s.

Stormy Weather p20 Ruskin, Turner, and the Storm Cloud

LOUISE PULLEN

p18

The Guild website is: www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk

p33

AGM 2019 in Sheffield p34 +Clive Wilmer’s Ruskin Lecture New Companions

p38

Ruskin in Sheffield

p40

RUTH NUTTER, MALAIKA CUNNINGHAM, HELEN PARKER, SIMON SELIGMAN

Ruskin in Ruskin Land

p44

GEOFFREY BROWN, MARK FROST, JENNY ROBBINS, JOHN ILES, KATE DARBY Pictures by JOHN ILES and JIM STEPHENSON

Ruskin in North America

p50

Ruskin in France

p53

LAURENCE ROUSSILLONCONSTANTY

PETER MILLER

Book Reviews National Gallery Conference p22

Ruskin in Manchester

p24

RACHEL DICKINSON

Many thanks to the contributors and the proof readers: Romee Day, Peter Miller, Simon Seligman and Rachel Dickinson.

Big Draw Japan 2019

JIM SPATES, GABRIEL MEYER, RYAN BERLEY

PETER DAY

The Guild is committed to using sustainable forest print stocks.

p32

DIVYA AND MASA KATO.

Two Exhibitions p14 The Art of Seeing and Art & Wonder

Sheffield S8 0TZ

A Birthday Celebration ROBERT HEWISON

The editor of The Companion is Peter Day. editor@guildofstgeorge.org.uk

Printed by Northend,

2020

The Fifth John Ruskin Prize p26 PETER DAY

Huntington Library Conference JIM SPATES AND SARA ATWOOD

Ruskin at The Ruskin

p54

JAMES S DEARDEN, SARA ATWOOD, HUGH HOBBS, PETER DAY, CLIVE WILMER, JULIA ARMSTRONG, STEPHEN WILDMAN, LAWRIE GROOM, CAROLINE IKIN, SIMON SELIGMAN, PETER BURMAN

Janet Barnes: A Life in the Arts p63 Ruskin 200: Into the Future p64 ANDREW HILL

p28

COVER PICTURE

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John Ruskin, engraving after a 1882 photograph by Elliott & Fry

SANDRA KEMP BACK COVER PICTURES/p15

A Wreath in Venice

p31

2 Temple Place by Richard Eaton

A LETTER FROM THE (NEW) MASTER

Dear Fellow Companions,

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I begin to write this letter on 8th February 2020, Ruskin’s 201st birthday. Casting back over the last year, my mind leaps from highlight to highlight; 2019 was remarkable and I am immensely proud of what we achieved. There is now a greater awareness of Ruskin and the significance of his ideas than has been the case since early in the last century. The Guild – directly through our initiatives and indirectly through the work of individual Companions around the globe, as well as through our wider networks – played a significant role in this Ruskin revival. This commemorative issue of The Companion looks back at a brilliant bicentenary year.

The successes of 2019 were the culmination of years of planning and collaborative efforts. Notably, the Guild’s decision to invest significant funds and time into the exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing paid even greater dividends than we had hoped. Partnering with Two Temple Place/The Bulldog Trust, Museums Sheffield and a range of lenders to hold a major free exhibition in London at the beginning of the bicentenary year started the celebrations of Ruskin with a bang (pages14-18). It raised awareness of Ruskin in the UK media and the wider population, (What the Critics Said on page 17). With our Collection at its heart, it helped to raise the Guild’s profile, drawing in new Companions. To give just one example, when I met Marco di Gregorio (page 38) from Milan at the AGM weekend in November, I was delighted to hear that he had learned about the Guild through the exhibition.

Inspired by the prospect of joining like-minded people active in improving the world through a Ruskinian lens, he became a Companion.

It was a year of highs, and a year of transitions. At the AGM, we thanked Clive Wilmer for 10 years of service as Master. The Guild’s current level of activity —unprecedented in its past — has been achieved during Clive’s tenure. Under his leadership, we developed a dual strategy to “dig deep” locally and spread out by building international relationships. Our Companionship now spans 12 countries, with particularly active groups in the USA and Canada (pages 28-29 and 50-53), as well as Italy (pages 11 and 31) and Japan (33, 35).

As Master-elect, I stood in for Clive in October to witness a new Companion, Community Designer Ryo Yamazaki from Japan, sign the roll when he came to Sheffield with a group of colleagues. Earlier in the year, Clive had similarly welcomed a number of North American Companions as they signed the roll on their May Ruskin tour of the UK. Companions also organised Ruskin conferences in countries beyond the UK: Laurence Roussillon-Constanty in Pau, France (page 53); Emma Sdegno in Venice, Italy (page 11); and Jim Spates with Sara Atwood in San Merino, California (pages 28-29). The Guild of St George is now global.

In the UK. we have been ‘digging deep’ in locations where we have physical resources. This has helped to increase significantly our numbers in Sheffield, where our Collection is housed and our Office has been located since late 2018 (pages 40-43), and in Bewdley, where we

own properties, including an ancient woodland known as ‘Ruskin Land’ (pages 44-49).

In this year of change, we marked the close of two long-running projects in these locations, supported by external funds, particularly from the HLF: Ruskin in Sheffield, led by freelance producer Ruth Nutter, and Ruskin in Wyre, led by Director Jenny Robbins and Companion Tim Selman. The Guild, very much focused on Clive’s strategy of “digging deep”, planned these to raise awareness of Ruskin ahead of 2019. Both projects introduced Ruskin’s ideas to new audiences in new ways and we will be sharing our understanding of the impact of this work in a book and a film. We now have more than 10 Companions living in and around semi-rural Bewdley and more than 50 in urban Sheffield.

We have also maintained close relations with partners. In 2019 we worked closely with The Big Draw (which the Guild founded as the Campaign for Drawing in 2000) by supporting the John Ruskin Prize for Art (pages 26-27) and through an annual contribution to their operating funds. Companions also organised Big Draw Festival events in a range of locations, including Bewdley, Kyoto, Sheffield and Venice. We continue the tradition, established by Ruskin, of presenting books to the Whitelands College’s May Monarch each year (page 8).

In 2019, we made a significant one-off contribution to Lancaster University’s The Ruskin, ensuring that their collection – a sister to ours – would remain intact and accessible in the UK (page 30). We also deepened our relationship with Sheffield’s Heeley Trust, from whom we rent office space in the former home of the Ruskin Collection, Meersbrook Hall; we are supporting Ruth Nutter to work with them on a parttime basis for a year, developing a Ruskin Room and activities with the local community.

The Guild is run by a Board of Directors. All nine

A new spin on the Guild from a new Master THERE are no moves to change the title, but the new Master is the first woman to occupy the position.

Rachel Dickinson joined the Guild in 2011, and became a director in 2014, taking over Jim Dearden’s “Ruskin Affairs” portfolio, then widened to the role of Director of Education.

Rachel was born and brought up on the east coast of Canada and first came to Britain in 1999 as a doctoral student at Lancaster University. In 2008 she published the results of her doctoral studies, the edited collection John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters. She has written on Ruskin and textiles, Ruskin and 19th century education, and “Of Ruskin, Women and Power”. Rachel Dickinson has curated several exhibitions: on Ruskin’s continental tours, on Ruskin and the ethics of textiles and last year’s Devil’s Darkness to Beacon City on Ruskin and Manchester.

This last was presented at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she lectures in English Literature.

of us are Companions who serve on the Board as unpaid volunteers, supported by two part-time members of staff and a part-time freelance producer.

The Guild relies on Companions to volunteer resources – of time, expertise and money – in order to achieve our collective goals. The pages of The Companion tell of many such volunteers.

The Guild of St George is not the John Ruskin fan club. It is a group of people – Companions – for whom Ruskin’s work resonates and who are thereby inspired actively to try and make the world better. We come from a wide range of cultural, economic, educational and employment backgrounds. As individuals, we are drawn to different aspects of Ruskin, his: writing on art, and work as an artist; support for heritage craft; desire to protect nature; message of access to beauty and education for all; meticulous efforts to record and preserve our architectural heritage; stance against cruelty to animals; openness about mental illness, and awareness that nature, exercise and art can help heal body and mind.. the list could go on. What is striking is that all of these aspects of Ruskin’s message are active. They require us to do something, and they all have a goal of adding Ruskinian wealth (the opposite of illth) and making lives better.

In January 2020, the Guild Directors held a strategy meeting at Ruskin Land in Bewdley to discuss ways to maintain the momentum of the Bicentenary year, while holding to the commitment made at the last few AGMs: that we would spend money less after 2019. We decided to adopt the Ruskin phrase “There is no Wealth but Life” as our strapline.

As I finish this letter in March, those words resonate more than I could have imagined then; in our world tossed and markedly changed by the waves of Covid-19, Ruskin’s words seem wiser than ever.

Best wishes,

Rachel Her research interests relate to Ruskin’s vision for sustainable living during the 19th century and how this can be reinterpreted for the 21st century in areas such as art, business management, crafts, education, ethical consumerism, museum curation, and even farming and land management.

Rachel co-ordinated the 2019 Festival of Ruskin in Manchester and was a selection panel member for the 2019 John Ruskin Prize for art. She serves on editorial boards, including that of the Journal of Victorian Culture.

Inspired by Ruskin, Rachel learned to spin yarn while working on her doctorate; she says that spinning remains her main source of relaxation. She also loves digging in a “postage-stamp sized garden” in a village near Lancaster, growing herbs and other plants chosen to attract bees, birds and butterflies.

Rachel is a striking public speaker who serves as a University Orator at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has given many lectures on Ruskin in the UK, Canada, France, Italy and the USA; and was very busy lecturing on Ruskin in his bicentenary year, even before she became Master.

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TEN YEARS AS MASTER Clive Wilmer talks to The Companion about an almost lifetime involvement with Ruskin and decades of work with the Guild.

I first read Ruskin as a student at Cambridge. I was taught by Tony Tanner, a great enthusiast; he made it feel it was essential to my life to read Ruskin, which it turned out to be. I was studying Victorian literature. It was in the 1960s, and people were beginning to notice Ruskin again; he was being republished in selections. I was struck first of all by the extreme beauty of his prose and the vividness of his verbal pictures, his visual representations. And then by his range of subjects.

One of Ruskin’s secrets is that he goes off the subject only to come back to it again. He has a way of connecting things that you had only a vague suspicion were connected before. About halfway through his career he decides to write down his ideas in the form of letters. I wonder what he thought as a young man; whether he got frustrated with himself for going off the subject. The place where you first notice this discursiveness is in the great essay The Nature of Gothic in his book The Stones of Venice. The chapter is itself a digression: he says we have to decide why we should call early Venetian architecture “Gothic”. So we have a chapter on that, what the Gothic style is, and before you know where you are there is this extraordinary attack on the factory system in industrial Britain, which he puts as a contrast with the mediaeval system of construction.

After Cambridge I went to Italy teaching

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English as a foreign language. I took Ruskin with me and saw many things through his eyes. Then in the 1970s I started getting my poetry published and one day my poetry publisher asked if I’d like to edit a selection of Ruskin. In the end it was published instead

by Penguin in 1985 (Unto this Last and Other Writings).

Although I started with the visual art, later on the social, economic and political writings took me over .

The book has sold very well; the extraordinary thing is the number of people in America who read that book; it tends to get used in university courses there, much more so than in Britain.

I joined the Guild in 1995. I’d heard of the Guild before that, but I wasn’t very attracted to it: frankly, it seemed a bit nutty. I didn’t want to be a Ruskin crank. But then I met Michael Wheeler who was then the Ruskin Professor at Lancaster University, and he recommended me. I thought I would meet a lot of other Ruskinians, which I hadn’t up to then. It was very illuminating joining the Guild: meeting people from so many walks of life reflecting the variety of Ruskin’s interests. Yes, some of my friends were sceptical about my joining the Guild; they thought I was giving myself up to some slightly cranky religion. But I must say I found Ruskin very liberating.

From about 2000, the Guild was preoccupied with one big issue: it was running the Campaign for Drawing, which in time became the Big Draw. The Board liberated it, let it float off; necessary, but in some ways a mistake. I’ve tried to draw it back towards the Guild with collaborations on things such as the John Ruskin Prize, for example.

Ruskin said there would be no Ruskinians. He didn’t want disciples; he wanted people to do the things he thought were important. The Guild is not meant to be an organisation of disciples; it’s meant to be of people trying to make the country a happier place, and the world as well. I think Britain is a very unhappy place at the moment; I’m not a pessimist but I’m very disturbed

by the way things are. We obviously don’t have the power—or the extent—to address national unhappiness.

But I think we can do exemplary work that gives people greater satisfaction in their lives and their communities.

I began to think that I might be a possible new

Master. I wasn’t a person who’d ever run things before, but this seemed worth doing. Ruskin clearly thought that the Master was going to be an autocrat, and everyone would do as he said. That’s not even remotely practical. The great thing about the Guild is working together with other people. A lot of what I’ve done has been inspired by what other directors have done, such as the work in the Wyre Forest started largely by John Iles. Being a bit of a dreamer myself, I’ve always been inspired by can-do people, and by seeing how you can change things from a very small base.

I began to see that the Guild was a rather accidental collection of things left over from the past, admirable and interesting but not very deeply rooted. I decided that we ought to be digging deeper and giving deeper roots to the possessions we already had. John was already doing that in the Wyre Forest. I felt we could do it in Sheffield as well: to make the Guild something that the people of Sheffield wanted to be interested in. It seemed to me that the fundamental objections to Capitalism and industrialism don’t really change. We can see ourselves to some extent drifting back into the era of injustices and inequalities that prevailed in Ruskin’s day. He also hugely anticipates the environmentalist movement in all kinds of ways; there is no issue more urgent today.

There are still communities we have to reach: we have very few ethnic minority Companions, for example. But we have hugely more women in the Guild, and many young people. When I joined the Guild there were very few Companions under 50, and they were mostly men. When I became Master there were about 90 Companions ; there are now over 300. I’m very proud of that, and of the fact that we now have a lot of overseas Companions: about a fifth of the total live abroad. Ruskin dreamed that the Guild would spread over the whole of Europe. We now have a lot of European Companions, so we’re beginning to do something he wanted to do. The North American branch of the Guild is beginning to take root. People were always asking Ruskin to go to America, but he always refused. He said: “Why would I go to a country with no castles in it?” But it’s not just America: Italy and Japan look very promising for the Guild.

One of the problems is that we never really use the Companions enough. It would be nice to have jobs for everyone. We’ve expanded the Guild and left a lot of people inactive who’d been excited by joining it.

It’s a thing which needs to be thought about now. We recently introduced not a subscription but pressure to contribute financially to the Guild; not much, but what

you can afford; and we also pointed out there were ways of contributing that are not financial. I’ve noticed that when people apply, they do tend to suggest things they could do for the Guild in their letters of application. It probably needs a Director to deal with that alone, but I shouldn’t make too many suggestions; I don’t want to get in the way of my successor. It would be nice to have Companions initiating things: it tends to be the Board that initiates, and others just follow.

2019 was rather extraordinary. We never expected to get quite so many people involved in Ruskin, or interested in him. We—and other people working for Ruskin—have been particularly successful in communicating Ruskin’s relevance to modern life.

That’s bound to change things, Ruskin is nothing if he’s not a preacher about the practical, and it will make people think differently about things. It has also been pleasing that so little attention has been directed to the criticism that has been made of Ruskin’s private life; essentially people have been looking at his ideas and the work he did.

Now that I’m no longer Master I want to do some writing of my own; I might write on Ruskin, but not at the moment; I want to write poetry, which is one of the things I do. But I’m not going to leave Ruskin behind.

Venice Approaching San Polo The space between the rooftops opens up And there, on a high gable in the gap, An angel has touched down, as if he were A bird of passage blown off course, secure In mastery of the air and yet dismayed At finding himself here, his life mislaid On a strange planet where the creatures die Not understanding why.

CLIVE WILMER Spring 2015 5

TRIBUTES TO A DEPARTING MASTER Torrents of messages, poems and original art poured in to honour Clive Wilmer on the occasion of his retirement as Master.

They were presented to him as a farewell card at the 2019 Annual Meeting (SEE PAGES 34-35). Some extracts: Your activism and initiatives have done a great deal for Ruskin's reputation. Your sensitiveness to both his aesthetics and to his economic ideas have strengthened his claims to our attention on both fronts. You leave the Guild in very good shape.

GRAHAM PARRY

I write from the hospital of SS. Giovanni e Paolo known so well to Clive as the Scuola grande di San Marco in Venice. My gratitude is to Clive for having made me meet again, in my old age, John Ruskin: a hero of my youth. It is also thanks to Clive’s mind, eyes and heart that I can enjoy daily passing by the Scuola grande di San Rocco: a house for us all.

MARIA LAURA PICCHIO FORLATTI

Thank you very much for converting our innocent souls into true Ruskinians. Thank you for inspiring to look with widely open eyes at every little bit of life, to cherish every moment of life to catch the beauty of nature and arts, to be as eager to inspire the rest as you do. It was such a gift and honour to be on Venice tours with you and to have all your passion and knowledge so generously shared with us. You have done a great job leading the Guild during 10 unforgettable years. With great passion and admiration along with deepest gratitude.

OLGA SINITSYNA and SASHA SMIRNOVA

I came to Ruskin and the Guild by an accident of geography; what an interesting, educational and exciting accident it has turned out to be. Clive was the inspiration behind the setting up of a Ruskin in Wyre steering group to consider a more active engagement with the Guild’s asset in Wyre and played an active part in establishing the Wyre Forest Landscape Partnership.

His time and energy have been invaluable. The resulting programme has created a living project which ripples out well beyond the confines of the Wyre Forest.

The myriad of other achievements during Clive’s time as Master have established a strong direction for the Guild of St George post 2019, making Ruskin relevant to today. Thank you!

JENNY ROBBINS 6

No goodbyes, dear Clive, (Master of things Ruskinian, duffer at none). Come with me anytime to find arguing Communists, potato growers, the rambling Carpenter and all the ghosts of green times and visions of green times to come.

SALLY GOLDSMITH My loveliest memory of Clive is standing beside him at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice while he guided us through the portraits and their stories in the first room of the beautiful anniversary Ruskin exhibition there.

Clive’s face and his voice expressed such fondness and familiarity, the gift of his years of scholarship and devotion to the role of Master. Clive brought a quality of tenderness to all his talk of Ruskin, which I think Ruskin – so hungry for tenderness – would have loved and reveled in. I can so easily imagine the two men as close friends, bonded by shared values and pleasure in the same manner of righteous goodness. It gives me pleasure to imagine Ruskin with such a friend as Clive.

MICHELLE LOVRIC

To he who comprehends the helpful laws, To one who feels what love with patience thaws, And what we may achieve year after year, A tribute Ruskinian and sincere: To one who heard that bright clarion cry From a sage long passed yet living still, Whose voice so persistently asked us why We chose not wealth but selected ill When cramped together we are made to fight In competition for our daily bread With those who otherwise our friends could be By working together, hands, hearts, and heads.

The inspiring one who took up the helm Of our scuola of companionship, Who made it prosper as a living realm That follows the best of that authorship Which gave us Stones, Unto This Last, and Fors, That showed love of beauty is e’er the key To open up hearts, fashion better laws, To look ahead in hope, and thus foresee Fresh forms of living, making, and speaking, Glimpses of vigour, brightness, and healing, Ways to make some place, no matter how small, Peaceful and fruitful and open to all.

To Clive, a wise Master, and a fine friend The good that you’ve done comes not to an end, But like the Wyre oak will grow and flower, Wonderful in its enduring power.

MARK FROST

Clive’s vision for the Ruskin in Sheffield project has resulted in artistic, cultural and political activities that have brought thousands of local people to an understanding of Ruskin’s ideals and an appreciation of the unique Collection in the city. The project has enriched my life in the past five years beyond all

expectation. I learned so much about Ruskin’s philosophy and soul from Clive’s A New Road on which the World Should Travel — a real revelation— and I experienced such wonder on the Companions’ trip to Venice in 2018. The Guild is a fabulous organisation within which to be creative and reflective. I think Clive’s erudition, commitment, compassion and joie de vivre as its figurehead serve as a shining example to all its Companions.

HELEN PARKER

endurance of the horrors of industrialization. He wished to extend to them another kind of wealth, the wealth of the mind and heart; the love of beauty and learning.

You have followed loyally all Ruskin's ideals and extended the membership to all parts of the world. I do hope that your task has been pleasurable personally; at times it must have been a battle. Do enjoy your retirement. It has been such a privilege to have known you.

CELIA AND TRISTRAM DE PIRO

Thank you so much for the constant support you have given to Whitelands College over so many years, and to me personally during my time as Head. I have greatly enjoyed working with you, and I look forward to continuing friendship now you are standing down as Master. With very best wishes from all at Whitelands.

It’s been a pleasure to spend time with you. Clive, and listen to your wise words—may they keep flowing on.

Good luck and good health, and let’s hope we bump into each other in Venice or Cambridge.

MARK GARNER

The standing of the Guild, as well as its achievements and ambitions, now more nearly match the goals of its great founder than at any time since his death. Without your dedication, hard work and deep commitment to Ruskin’s ideals, such great progress would have been impossible. Two hundred years from his birth, all of those who revere Ruskin owe you a great debt.

DAVID BARRIE

For Clive Wilmer: Sargent in Venice “he often painted from within a gondola” Close up, a nipple of paint.

Features fully realised – savour the redness of my girl’s lips, notice please the joke string of onions across her cream blouse.

We’ll set her to work on the water, hands clasped saint-like over her crotch, recline her against a wash of scumbled passion. Or put her through her paces in the shabby hallway of some palazzo, light from the far end of a passageway streaming in dead opulence where ghosts are taking tea with distant cousins till the crack of doom. You will find here that steps come to nothing. Sea-water laps up the stone – crafts loaded with fresh produce angle away.

My subject eats a peach, lets juice dribble down her chin, dares me to hold her gaze, senses exactly how far in I am.

PETER CARPENTER

Congratulations on Ten Triumphant Years as Master of the Guild. You have worked wonders and we are all deeply grateful to you for your hard work, commitment and sound judgment. Warmest possible wishes for the future—more poetry, perhaps?

DAVID INGRAM The Guild has flourished and grown under your leadership especially in the Sheffield area where my original roots were. As a child I remember well the city’s smoke and grime, its poverty and slums. Ruskin had a deep love for these working people, their

KATE GENEVER

The ten years of his Mastership have witnessed (among many other things) the establishment of a vibrant and growing branch of the Guild in North America. The success of so many projects owes very much to Clive’s vision and to his determination that the Guild must become a force for good in the modern world, an organization actively promoting and enacting humane social change.

As Master, Clive has proven himself to be innovator of the first rank, whose willingness to look at and do things differently have energized the Guild and enriched the lives of Companions immeasurably. He leaves the Guild not only as a greatly revitalized organization but as one prepared to tackle many new challenges. He has walked in the steps of the First Master of the Guild in ways which would have made that First Master very proud indeed.

JIM SPATES, SARA ATWOOD and GABRIEL MEYER

I wish you every success and joy and more time to read..Ruskin! Thank you for the impressive work you have done for many years for the Guild.

CYNTHIA GAMBLE

I began to get close to Ruskin only when writing my book The Fight for Beauty. I soon realised I had a lot to learn. I asked Clive to read my drafts, and he did so with patience and responded with generosity. And since I joined the Guild I have learned so much more! I feel an enormous gratitude to the Guild and to Clive in particular for keeping the Ruskinian flame alive. Clive’s quiet patience, deep knowledge and wonderful sense of humour are an example to us all.

FIONA REYNOLDS

For me and my architecture students visiting the city you brought Ruskin’s Venice to life for all of us and we learnt to look much more closely as a result. As children played around us in the winter sunshine of Campo San Polo we speculated over whether Venice, despite all appearances, could be a model for a car-free, people-friendly, sustainable city. This surprising and thought-provoking discussion gave me an insight into how Ruskin could open up new connections between the past, present and future.

CAROLYN BUTTERWORTH

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NEWS AND NOTES BRANTWOOD BRONZE

that it could be donated to Brantwood during the Bicentenary Year, for permanent display. Happily, donations were sufficient and the sculpture was sent to Coniston. The Curator Howard Hull has placed it prominently on the table in the drawing room in front of the Van Akin Burd Library, also dedicated in 2019. Both will serve as enduring symbols of the ties between admirers of Ruskin who live on both sides of the Atlantic.

WHITELANDS MAY DAY FESTIVAL Clive Wilmer has missed only one Whitelands May Festival in the past 13 years, and the 2019 one was his last as Master. He writes :

THANKS to the generosity of North American Companions, Brantwood now has a new statue of John Ruskin in old age.

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Gabriel Meyer writes: The bronze was discovered by Stuart Denenberg, a Companion who for many years was a fine art dealer in California. He was one of those on the American Ruskin Tour of England in Spring 2019.

The work had been sculpted in 1904 for the St. Louis World’s Fair by Gustav Borglum, creator of the Mount Rushmore Memorial of American Presidents in South Dakota. A lifelong admirer of Ruskin, Borglum had visited him at Brantwood in the later 1890s and did some sketches of him sitting in his chair. These became the basis for his sculpture, of which only a few castings were made. One cast was bought straight away at the Fair by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it was only its second purchase of a contemporary bronze.

Stuart was able to negotiate a fair price with the dealer, and an appeal was made to North American Companions and members of The Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles so

THE Guild has traditionally presented the Ruskin books to May Monarchs and their supporters at the May Day festival. With the help of Companion Beate Howitt, I recently made more contact with former May Monarchs, notably Noreen Sullivan, the eldest of those who still attend May Day, and with the Chair of the Guild of St Ursula, Jean Adams.

The Head of Whitelands College Mark Garner and I agreed to invite the May Monarchs, representatives of the College and Companions of the Guild to a dinner on the Friday night.

Gilly King, the Whitelands Curator and Archivist, also a Companion, mounted an exhibition of Ruskin’s gifts to the College and talked about the exhibits. I had seen the Ruskin donation long ago and had forgotten how rich and generous it was. It includes a dozen very high quality copies of Turner watercolours by William Ward; two engravings by Dürer and four by Ludwig Richter: ancient coins and manuscripts, three Ruskin watercolours, and several Ruskin letters.

There are also many important books, most either dedicated to or annotated by Ruskin; two first editions of Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary; a complete, magnificent, volume of John Gould’s exotic birds; several photogravure volumes of Italian sculpture; several volumes of the collected edition of Ruskin published under his control; working copies of several of his books with marginal annotations for revision, and more.

Also on display were the beautiful May Queen dress designed by Kate Greenaway and several gold crosses, including those designed by Arthur Severn. To my surprise I discovered

that I was one of the very few people present who had seen these treasures before. Even the May Monarchs hadn’t. Gilly King suggested that the College might hold such an exhibition every year and encourage the students to see it, a plea I endorsed in my afterdinner speech.

The new Vice-Chancellor of Roehampton University Jean-Noel Ezingeard was attending his first formal College occasion. Afterwards he made it clear that our thoughts had not fallen on deaf ears; he was enthusiastic about finding new ways to share the collection with students.

The College provided an excellent dinner; the May Monarchs ensured that there was a delightfully convivial atmosphere. Jenny Robbins, Simon Seligman and I represented the Guild, with Gilly, Mark and Beate, all Companions. Jenny and I spoke after dinner. The next day, past Master Jim Dearden joined us from the Isle of Wight for the May Day service and celebrations. It was a very happy occasion.

APPRECIATIONS MALCOLM HARDMAN 1943-2019 Stephen Wildman and Ray Haslam write: DOCTOR Malcolm Hardman, who has died at the age of 76, was Reader in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and former Director of Graduate Studies. Condolences go to Janet, his wife of 47 years. A classical scholar at heart – he was a Senior Scholar in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge —he wrote primarily on Victorian

poetry and prose, including Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy.

Ruskin was one of the Six Victorian Thinkers in his major study of 1991.

His 1986 book Ruskin and Bradford: An Experiment in Victorian Cultural History is recognised as a landmark study of the way in which evidence of a major writer’s work can be teased out of a wide variety of written evidence.

Having attended the seminal Brantwood conference organised by Jim Dearden in 1969, Malcolm maintained a lifelong interest in Ruskin, producing articles which were never less than challenging in title and content, from Ruskin’s “Massy Commonsense” in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 1976 to Who is Silvia?: Ruskin and the question of coherence in the Ruskin Review and Bulletin in 2015.

He acted as President of the Ruskin Society and was a valued Visiting Researcher in what was then the Ruskin Library and Research Centre at Lancaster University; he attended many events and gave seminar papers, always enlivening the proceedings. His writings, lectures and even his

personal letters and e-mails were memorably sprinkled with Greek and Latin quotations, alongside allusions to Shakespeare and modern literature, offering the nearest one could imagine to the range of mind and interests of Ruskin himself.

Malcolm was and remained a proud son of Bolton, attending St Andrews School, Four Lane Ends, and singing in the Deane Church choir. He wrote a remarkable trilogy of books detailing the area’s cultural life: A Kingdom in Two Parishes: Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 15211689; Classic Soil: Community, Aspiration and Debate in the Bolton Region of Lancashire, 1819-1845 and Global Dilemmas: Imperial Bolton-le-Moors from the Hungry Forties to the Death of Leverhulme.

In his own words, although he lived near Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, “his roots lie farther north, in the Pennine chain of high moorland that runs from Derbyshire up to Scotland.

This ‘backbone of England’ provides not only the challenge and resources to create the modern world, but also

the space and inspiration to generate an imaginative critique of that world”.

Malcom enjoyed pointing out infelicities in the national newspapers; in 2003 he rebuked the Daily Telegraph for allowing the phrase “One in five have” and dismissing the idea that a larger number could be implied by the “one”, hence the plural verb. To Malcolm, “communication should not be a matter of guesswork, but a matter of clarity within a syntactical context.

We should not have to guess what our informant may think he is saying, but be enlightened by information that he has given us. In the context ‘one in five’, one still means one and five means five.”

BOB STEELE 1925-2018 Tony Chisholm writes: BOB Steele died in August 2018, in British Columbia. Over 25 years I was privileged to exchange many thoughts, ideas and arguments with this >

I had wandered to the trail’s junction; one way to an elegant, circular return, but longer than simply turning back the way I had come.

It was clear the intelligent thing to do was to turn back…

It would be foolish to do the longer, rock-dense, magnificent way back, and besides, returning the way I came was beautiful, and that, after all, was the point of my walk. I stood there, in the brilliant sun, reasoning it out.

Sensible, not foolish. So, of course, I took the longer way. Happily.

BILL MAYER

BILL MAYER Nick Friend writes: BILL Mayer was a distinguished if short-lived Companion of the Guild.

He was a photographer, working especially in the Californian desert, a gourmet cook and a wine merchant.

Bill dealt particularly in German wines, on which he was a notable expert. This took him frequently to Germany which he knew well; his understanding of German culture provided an integral link with Ruskin.

But he was best known as a poet, a student of Jack Gilbert in California.

He had six books of poetry to his name, published by Pegasus Books.

Bill was married to Companion Dr Jane McKinne-Mayer, medievalist art historian and teacher. Bill and Jane attended Ruskin-inspired lectures and seminars I gave in Berkeley, and Jane inveigled him into coming on the Ruskin Grand Tour of England that our organisation Inscape ran in May 2019. Through his sensitivity and fluency Bill made a huge contribution to the success of that tour.

He was inspired by Jane, by that tour and by his rereading of Ruskin to become a Companion of the Guild.

Very sadly he did not live to sign the Roll. On the tour he was already suffering from colon cancer, but he was determined not to let it get in the

way of the revelations afforded him by Ruskin in a special year.

His quiet spirit was expressed in his widely admired poetry. Each poem conveyed a fascination with the interactions between humanity and the natural world. It is a poetry of fellowship with living beings and with the wealth of life. He was a Ruskinian throughout his life without knowing it until the end.

Bill died in the autumn of 2019. It meant much to him to be made a Companion; had he lived, he would have made significant contributions to the awareness of Ruskin in the United States. Those of us who knew and loved him were privileged.

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and language development. In its own way his work was a declaration and reflection of the tradition of the Guild.

For those fortunate to come within his orbit Bob's legacy is assured; his life's work has left clear markers for others to follow.

The last document I received from him was a delightful and characteristically closely-argued piece about The Characteristics of Classical Line with the sub heading From a Letter to A Friend. It was ever thus.

Bob Steele 2002

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> visionary pioneer and campaigner for art education. Bob’s teaching career started in 1950. Over time he taught children, young people and adults, as well as establishing a distinctive theory of art education that informed his critical work and the practice of future teachers. Bob was Emeritus Professor of Art Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. After his retirement he founded the Drawing Development Network: a loose association of parents, teachers, academics and other interested individuals in Canada and across the world for whom the relationship between drawing and literacy was regarded as significant and central to the growth and development of the individual.

He had great intellect and was generous to a fault in his willingness to share and disseminate the results of his thinking. His modesty masked a profound and passionate commitment to education in general and drawing in particular. It was his advocacy of the power and pertinence of drawing to understanding, the development of visual literacy for the general good and well-being of children and adults alike, that leave a lasting impression.

His publications provide a record of his unwavering academic resolve but also of a humanity and gentleness underpinned by an indefatigable search for truths as exemplified in works such as Draw me a Story, The Drawing Path for Children, The Smith Ranch After School, and later papers with beguiling titles such as Never Too Late to Sing, and The Schooling of a Nature Lover. He wrote with an enviable assurance and his submissions were both reflective and pragmatic: an acute balance of ideas, possibilities and ambitions.

Bob was admitted as a Companion in absentia in 2011 for his unwavering investment in art education, literacy

Companion Tony Chisholm is collating Bob Steele's publications, papers and correspondence. They will eventually be placed in the National Arts Education Archive at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK where they will be available for research purposes.

DAVID WALKER BARKER 1947-2019 Stephen Wildman writes: THOSE who knew David Walker Barker will remember a big, gentle, quietly passionate man of

University, where David taught in the School of Design. Following his project at Killhope, the North of England Lead Mining Museum, In search of a hidden landscape, we collaborated on an exhibition which became Objects of Curious Virtue: Echoes of John Ruskin, opening at the Ruskin Library in October 2010. Never can so many objects have been brought together in a gallery —eight large and four small painted cabinets crammed with minerals, paint tubes, found objects and small sculptures (many carefully rusted by exposure to the elements). They were given intriguingly enigmatic titles such as The Virtue of Stained Earth. Somehow we also found room for a group of minerals borrowed from the Guild collection, as well as David’s transcendently earthy paintings and sketchbooks (a small mixed media Landscape with Quarry, shown at the Royal Academy in 1987, is beside me as I write).

The catalogue reveals a deep knowledge and understanding of Ruskin’s interests and writings. David was the first contemporary artist invited to exhibit at the Ruskin Gallery in Norfolk Street, his exhibition Fragments of Time (1987) displayed in conjunction with the mineral collection he helped to reorganise, as he wrote “creating a synthesis of corresponding interests in geology and artistic practice”. This unique combination will be greatly missed, as will he.

BRIAN WALKER 1938-2018 Terry Johnson FCLAS writes:

Yorkshire. The son of a coal miner, his abiding love was for the earth itself and what it shelters, its minerals and memories. In Contained Histories (2005) he recalled this: ‘“Here lad, turn over this stone’ and as a dutiful 10-year-old I did as father instructed as he placed in my hand a pebble of shale picked from the mound of coal he was shovelling. Turning the stone over, the obverse side showed a delicate trace of leaves shiny black against the grey shale. My father had introduced me to ‘fossils’ in a most unpretentious and profound way. He gave no lecture but handed me 285 million years without ceremony.”

We first met in 2007, introduced by David Hill, a colleague of his at Leeds

BRIAN’S early years at school involved art in many forms and at different levels. After his National Service, he qualified from Bede College, Durham as an “art specialist” and was at the forefront of the teaching of handwriting in schools. He excelled at calligraphy (and won prizes for it).

His calligraphy came via the Society for Italic Handwriting. Some years later Brian was accepted onto the Associates Training Scheme of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators and achieved Fellowship of that Society.

His calligraphic work was exquisite and he became an avid student, practitioner and master of Spencerian Script; he was known the world over for this. He produced his own Gall Oak ink which sold world-wide; he collaborated with a manufacturer to

produce a steel pointed-pen nib which was later imprinted with the “Walker Finewriter” logo.

He was a guiding light to many, including myself; he helped me to gain fellowship of the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society, of which he was a founding member 25 years ago. His influence is felt to this day.

For many years, Brian calligraphed the names of new Companions into the Rolls of The Guild of St. George (below).

I am proud and honoured to carry on where he left off. The calligraphic world and his many friends are that bit poorer without him.

Ca’ Foscari, on the Grand Canal

Janet Barnes writes:

COMMUNITY SPIRIT I have very fond memories of working with Brian on several exhibitions in the Ruskin Gallery during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The medieval illuminated manuscripts in the Guild of St George collection were the subject of an exhibition in 1986; Brian offered calligraphy classes as part of the education programme.

They were very popular and introduced several people in the city to the craft of calligraphy. He was a talented teacher, as well as being an expert scribe.

In 1988 Brian also helped the Ruskin Gallery with the original design of the leaflet for Holbein's Dance of Death, and he also prepared handwritten labels for each of the prints, lending a contemporary feel to the whole display.

His close contacts with the Society of Scribes and Illuminators meant that he was well placed to help organise the exhibition The Written Word: Italic Handwriting in 1990 which included his own work as well as the work of many of the prominent scribes in the UK. Without Brian and his generosity with his contacts, it would have been unlikely that the Ruskin Gallery would have been able to bring the work of such wonderful craftspeople to Sheffield or understand more clearly the craftsmanship and techniques that went into the production of the medieval manuscripts in the collection.

Howard Hull reports on the conference ‘A Great Community’: John Ruskin’s Europe held in October 2019 at Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice.

VENICE, balmy autumnal days, the water glittering and not overcrowded; we gathered to explore Ruskin’s Europe in the city that shaped him more than any other. The conference ‘A Great Community’ John Ruskin’s Europe was the brain child of Companion Emma Sdegno. It was a truly inspiring exploration of the scale, complexity and richness of Ruskin’s engagement with Europe and his contribution to its cultural and social evolution.

Over three days there were some 30 presentations on aspects of Ruskin’s Europe ranging from its geography to its aesthetics, its literary and artistic pantheon to its bridges and roads.

Listening in three different languages without translation certainly tested us. But it was amazing how the language barriers melted away as the social bond of the gathering grew. With our residual colonial mindset, Ruskin has much to teach us who live in Britain in our “sceptered isle” about cultural openness.

Ruskin tends to be thought of as a home-grown property who took his greatness to a rather run-down Europe to “rescue” it. What this conference showed was that Ruskin was and remains first and foremost a

European. Emma Sdegno teaches at the University of Ca’ Foscari and we were treated to breath-taking venues: the Baroque ceilings of the Aula Magna Silvio Trentin and a panoramic view of the Grand Canal from the Aula Barrato. Emma is also a consorella of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and we were welcomed to the Scuola for a public talk by Salvatore Settis on “a paysage moralisé for our time”.

Drawing on Panofsky’s term for a landscape of symbolic moral value and a wealth of illustration from anthropomorphic paintings from the renaissance to the modern, he spoke to the restless inner readings of the European landscape which are an integral part of our cultural heritage.

The talk took place surrounded by the magnificent cycle of Tintoretto’s wall and ceiling paintings, so beloved of Ruskin. At the end of the talk we were plunged into darkness and treated to a slow and breathtaking reveal of the Tintorettos one by one.

The final event, a sort of coda, was a presentation by the students of Ca’ Foscari of their work with Kate Genever and Steve Pool of the Sheffield-based collaborative arts practice Poly-Technic addressing the theme Never Land: Europe in 200 years through the production of a vivid series of prophetic collage posters.

Of all the Ruskin-related subjects to which the term of “relevance” could be attached in his bicentenary year, John Ruskin’s Europe has had to be one of the timeliest. That it should take place in Venice, so threatened by climate change, was even more poignant.

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John Ruskin 200: EAST AURORA, NY

John Ruskin and the Beginnings of the Arts and Crafts Movement A conference at the Roycroft Campus p 51

CALIFORNIA

19th century Prophet, 21st century Visionary A conference at the Huntington Library p 28

TOKYO and KYOTO

Big Draw Japan

p33

HARVARD

Victorian Visionary at the Houghton Library celebrating the R Dyke Benjamin Ruskin Collection p 50

Ruskin’s Bicentenary year 2019 was the occasion for a notable series of events, exhibitions and conferences across the world. Many of them had strong connections with the Guild of St George.

This edition of The Companion reports on an outburst of international enthusiasm.

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YALE / SURREY

Unto This Last An exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and at the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey p 58

A year of wonders LONDON TWO TEMPLE PLACE

The Power of Seeing A hugely popular exhibition which set the tone for Bicentenary year. See pages 14-18

ENGLAND The 2019 American Ruskin tour in England p 52

Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud pp 19-21

SHEFFIELD MILLENNIUM GALLERY MANCHESTER John Ruskin Prize p 26

BEWDLEY MUSEUM

LONDON NATIONAL GALLERY Beautiful, Peaceful, Fruitful p 44

From ‘Devil’s Darkness’ to Beacon City

Art For the Nation Conference p 22 Art and Wonder The London show refocussed p 14

Manchester Metropolitan University

VENICE

p 24 PAU Mediating Ruskin

LANCASTER THE RUSKIN

Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future An exhibition to celebrate the purchase of the Ruskin Whitehouse Collection p30

A Great Community John Ruskin’s Europe: A conference at Università Ca’ Foscari p 11 A conference at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour p53

FROM THE CYCLOPAEDIA OR, UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, AND LITERATURE BY ABRAHAM REES, 1820

YORK ART GALLERY AND ABBOT HALL GALLERY, KENDAL

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Ruskin200 Two exhibitions that caught the public imagination Louise Pullen was the Curator of The Power of Seeing in London and Art & Wonder in Sheffield. She writes about producing both shows.

THIS is a tale of two exhibitions. One created in partnership with Two Temple Place, London, the other mounted at home in the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield.

For many of those involved the initial ideas came into being some five years ago; the focus was then on one celebratory touring exhibition, with works drawn from the vibrant natural history collections of the Collection of the Guild of St George. Our pitch was for an exhibition on Ruskin and science; it seemed a natural successor to our previous Ruskin Triennial exhibitions in 2000 on the themes of sustainability, landscape and craftsmanship.

But Two Temple Place required something different. In the spring of 2017, the exhibition project team decided that we should address the following question: “John Ruskin; why should we care?”

Exhibitions aside, this led us to reassess what it was about Ruskin and the Collection of the Guild of St George that “spoke” loudest about his thoughts; to look at his ideas regarding the education and wellbeing of Sheffield’s workers, to see the joy of nature in so much of the collection and to look that little bit closer at the diversity, colour and texture of natural objects. The statement “why we should care about Ruskin” is intrinsically linked to the collection: he cared enough about the wellbeing of workers to try and establish an institution to make people’s lives that little bit better and to draw for them a picture of what is beautiful in the world around them.

Thus—returning to the exhibitions—in many ways the themes would remain similar. We needed of course to create something that suited each venue’s unique

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LOUISE PULLEN has been Ruskin Collection Curator at Museums Sheffield for the past 15 years.

requirements: their architecture, their expectations and most importantly their audiences. Two Temple Place knew they had a key audience of over 60s, but they also reach out to children and young people through their exhibition programme. Museums Sheffield has a diverse audience, but one which is used to a permanent Ruskin Gallery and three larger Ruskin exhibitions in recent years. Each exhibition needed a different feel. Storylines were weighted at Two Temple Place more to biography, and the St George’s Museum and at Sheffield towards Ruskin’s life in natural history. But for the sake of time, cost and practicality, both needed to share a similar object list.

Much of the similarity needed to be retained because of exhibition loans. While the Guild’s Ruskin Collection is understandably versatile in illustrating Ruskin’s ideas, it contains very few of his own drawings. We therefore knew that for exhibitions that would celebrate Ruskin’s life and work we would need to borrow quite heavily, so that his intricate drawings could demonstrate both his vision and his artistic ability.

While some of the loaned works were only shown in one or other of the venues, for the most part—for financial reasons (borrowing is expensive and time consuming)-we needed to request loans that could be used in both.

For a polymath such as Ruskin, these works could quite easily be used to illustrate different subjects in each exhibition.

In visualising exhibition themes, groupings and routes, one of the key things to consider is always the architectural interior of the gallery space. Two Temple Place and the Millennium Gallery can hardly be more different; we quickly realised how much my knowledge of the Millennium Gallery’s purpose-built and unadorned, adaptable interior played a role in our exhibition curation. The opulent, panelled spaces of Two Temple Place presented an immediate difficulty: we did not know it so well, but did recognise that the small drawings and watercolours which were the backbone of the exhibition would be easily lost or confined amongst the pilasters and cornucopia.

Consequently, larger paintings and massed groups of small works were needed to punctuate the space and draw the eye across the rooms. The exception was the small library space, whose bookshelves and >

In Two Temple Place: The Power of Seeing

In the Millennium Gallery: Art and Wonder

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> plainer panelling immediately seemed to call for a re-creation of the St George’s Museum; this would give a London audience a more personal introduction to the Guild’s collection and Ruskin’s work. In Sheffield we wanted a very different aesthetic, showing why the Guild’s collection is related so comprehensively to natural history. It was to be a joyful celebration of Ruskin’s wonder at nature.

Feedback shows that the exhibition premise of nature’s wonder shone out at both exhibitions, and of course the collection and loans took centre stage. But in Sheffield the design company Cafeteria produced some magnificent graphics —a caprice on works from the collection— to highlight our theme. These drew visitors in visually, from the large poster at Sheffield railway station, to the octopus at the gallery door, to the insects that buzzed and fluttered around the text panels. We hoped that in producing graphics that were less overtly “of Ruskin” we might draw in a broader audience, alongside those to whom such names as Ruskin and Turner might appeal.

These were very much collaborative exhibitions between the Guild, Two Temple Place and Museums Sheffield. Two Temple Place had its own project team.

In drawing The Power of Seeing together, we worked particularly with Rebecca Hone who was responsible for co-ordinating the exhibition works and physically mounting the displays. Within Museums Sheffield, we work collaboratively across the organisation; in this case Alison Morton, Head of Exhibitions, and I worked very closely to co-curate the exhibitions supported by our Director of Programmes, Kirstie Hamilton.

The wider departments of Museums Sheffield, not least the Technical team and Communication team, were of course heavily involved with Art & Wonder, but at Two Temple Place too, the teams across Museums Sheffield came together to help deliver The Power of Seeing.

consider longevity when we plan our exhibitions and thus we put money from our exhibition budget into conservation and other longer term projects.

After conservation work we were delighted to mount a grouping of Edward Donovan’s vertebrate studies together on a wall, which previously was impossible as they had been bound together as a group. Several bird studies were also conserved and the digitisation that took place for interactive and design purposes adds to our online catalogue. This in turn increases the accessibility of the collection. We also needed more picture frames; these, and all new mounting were produced in standard sizes so that works can be easily interchanged in the coming years.

For an exhibition rooted in the ideas of someone born 200 years ago, we felt strongly that we needed to show something of Ruskin’s presence in current practice and thus contemporary art needed to have its place too.

We knew from the Ruskin Triennial exhibitions that audiences respond very positively to such interventions and that such works open up Ruskinian understanding in new ways. Therefore we were pleased that, along with several other contemporary artworks, Dan Holdsworth’s powerful, yet quietly evocative Acceleration Structures (2018) and Hannah Downing’s superlatively detailed Vertical Panorama (2013) drew particular praise from our visitors. Timorous Beasties’ giant lampshade and panels incorporated illustrations from the Guild’s collection itself.

I hope that for the Guild, the exhibitions fitted a brief to show the relevance of Ruskin now. The Collection of the Guild of St George is jewel-like, and for many of our visitors — and indeed reviewers—it was the mineral collection that stole the show, just as Ruskin said they would almost 150 years ago. Nature comes in many shapes, forms and colours. I hope its inspiration will stay with our visitors for a long time to come.

People beyond these key partners and the various lenders—to whom we are so grateful— played roles that were significant yet hidden within the fabric of the exhibitions. Staff within the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum helped me identify a figurine alluded to in Ruskin’s unique written style.

Charlotte Hubbard, conservator at the V&A, came in to assess the safety of moving and showing the plaster casts.

Curators and researchers across the Ruskinian fields bounced ideas backward and forward; this played an important role in making sure that in a year of international Ruskin 200 exhibitions and events we did not tread too firmly on each other’s toes. The other figure who helped me more personally in my research, from beyond the grave, was Susie Beever, Ruskin’s neighbour and friend who had a keen and loving relationship with nature. Her correspondence with Ruskin seemed to elicit some of his most unadorned and yet illuminating prose; I hope to look more at her life and work in future. Looking to the future with practicality in mind, we at Museums Sheffield fully 16

Stealing the show: an opal from Queensland

REBECCA HONE, Head of Exhibitions at Two Temple Place, writes: SINCE 2011, Two Temple Place has opened to the public once a year as part of our Winter Exhibition Programme. The focus is on showcasing regional public collections and developing emerging curatorial talent. We are extremely proud of the partnerships we have made with museum and gallery collections from around the UK—like Museums Sheffield and the Guild—and of the effect the exhibitions have had on raising the profile of the collections; building confidence of curators and staff to engage with their collections in new ways and strengthening relationships with key stakeholders.

John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing was Two Temple Place's most visited exhibition to date: 57,032 visitors over 12 weeks, including 916 children from state schools around London who took part in free literacy workshops.

We were delighted with the response: we had coverage on the exhibition in every national newspaper and were flooded with positive comments from visitors, many getting to know Ruskin for the first time. For those who already knew of him, the exhibition opened up a new side of Ruskin: his intense interest in the natural world.

The team here in turn learn an incredible amount from the planning and delivery of each exhibition and from each of our partner organisations. Skills and knowledge sharing is an important part of our exhibition development.

It is one of the many pleasures of my jobs, working with new collections each year, learning about objects and collections that are new to me and working out how we can present collections and engage new audiences.

It is a joy to see the work we have done at Two Temple Place continue in some way with partner museums and in this case, develop into a sister exhibition in Sheffield: John Ruskin: Art and Wonder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID The exhibitions made a big impact on critics in Britain and abroad. Some samples:

IN the London Evening Standard Melanie Mcdonagh wrote that Ruskin was “getting the moment he deserves”. She continued: “This exhibition is taken from the collection he bequeathed to the Guild of St George that he founded. It’s the north’s gift to London. The striking thing about the collection, which is here supplemented by useful loans, is that there are relatively few important pieces in it; this is the opposite of a blockbuster exhibition. There are any number of notable and interesting things, however.” And after discussing our inheritance from Ruskin, she finished, definitively: “You know we’ve got nothing like him now, not even close.”

In a four-star review in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones said: “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, snowwhite quartz, bubbling haematite.”

The 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.”

In the Financial Times, Jackie Wullsläger wrote of the tensions inherent in housing such an exhibition in Two Temple Place: “The sort of millionaire’s pastiche that Ruskin would have hated, even though it is indebted to his own hymn to Gothic.

The Stones of Venice sings out from its every corner, but as if Astor’s architect has played it out of tune: here Ruskin’s Gothic ideal is Disneyfied (pre-Disney) into something approaching modern camp.

Sculpted cherubs chat on the telephone, carvings of The Three Musketeers adorn the grand mahogany staircase, faux medieval stained glass windows glint on polychrome marble floors recalling Venetian palazzi. It is glorious, comic, the perfect backcloth for a Ruskin show—connecting to his arguments about architecture, capitalism and

decadence, but also a foil to his earnestness.” Jackie Wullsläger continued: “The world perceived through the eyes of John Ruskin is a wondrous, exquisite, tormenting place: beauty experienced as rapture, ugliness denounced in a moralist’s shrill tones, delight and despair equally extreme, detail evoked with an obsession for minutiae at once enchanting and suffocating. All this flows through this engrossing exhibition.”

On the website theartsdesk.com, Marina Vaizey wrote: “The power of seeing was the bedrock of John Ruskin’s philosophy. In the bicentenary of his birth, a revelatory exhibition at Two Temple Place in London opens out the idea and makes it manifest through both his own work and the treasures of his collection.”

“Like walking through an orderly attic, we see the objects that furnished his mind. They are largely drawn from the public museum he founded in Sheffield, the St George’s Museum, and supplemented by holdings from museums and galleries across England: testimony to his abiding impact on public collections.” And she ended: ”His views continue to permeate society at all levels, his hopes and aspirations acknowledged and inspirational if still far short of reality. As he would have wished, there is much in this absorbing exhibition to both instruct and entertain. In keeping with his own grand designs for a universal appreciation of art and of beauty, it is open free.”

The New York Times devoted a long article to explaining “Why John Ruskin, Born 200 years ago, is Having a Comeback”. Scott Reyburn quoted Clive Wilmer, Louise Pullen, Robert Hewison and Jim Spates in his survey of what the International New York Times version headlined as “A Victorian critic’s resurgence”.

On Front Row Late on BBC 2 Mary Beard used the Two Temple Place exhibition as a starting point for a discussion with David Olusoga, Shahidha Bari and Simon Jenkins on whether it is possible to agree on the meaning of beauty. On BBC Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg recorded a feature from the exhibition for Broadcasting House. Louise Pullen appeared on Start the Week. And on BBC Radio 3, Companions Susanne Fagence Cooper and Kevin Jackson discussed Ruskin on Free Thinking.

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THE HILLS ARE ALIVE

ACROSS the room full of artworks by Ruskin or inspired or commissioned by him, we are beckoned by a piece of art he could not have dreamed of. It is a dazzling bird’s eye videotape of a shifting digital skeleton of ice and mountains in the Alps. It seemingly lets the viewer see into the heart of physical nature.

Dan Holdsworth’s 15-minute animated film is called Acceleration Structures 2018, and it was one of the outstanding features of the outstanding Ruskin shows at Two Temple Place and in Sheffield. But how did this happen?

He explained to The Companion.

Dan’s mother was an art teacher; his father was a science teacher and she started using his research imagery in her pictures. As a teenager Dan was interested in ornithology; and he had his own darkroom at home at the age of 14. He studied photography at the London College of Printing, now part of the University of the Arts, and graduated in 1998.

As a photographer, one of his early interests was how we see things, and the landscape of the car: the edges of cities, between cities and shopping centres. “The late capitalist world,” he says.

Dan went on to explore and photograph nature and the impact of 18

Dan Holdsworth photographed the inner life of mountains for the Ruskin exhibitions in London and Sheffield people on it in many far-flung parts of the world, including striking pictures of the European launch site for Ariane rockets in the Amazon rain forest in Guiana. But rather than just document what he saw, he says he was interested in reflecting the psychology of how he perceived things.

In 2000 he went to Iceland, and was struck by encountering glaciers there, and the way they were being changed by human and industrial intervention.

Much of his more recent work has involved working with specialist geologists, geomorphologists, and using their technology to try to uncover things that are normally hidden from us.

Dan Holdsworth became a sponsor of a geology PhD student at Northumbria University who was using imaging technology to create 3D representations of rock falling from glaciers; until recently this work

had been mainly done in two dimensions. He had been interested in Ruskin for some time, and they both visited The Ruskin in Lancaster to continue their investigations.

Dan Holdsworth made photographic surveys by helicopter and using drones, and then using surveying technology to extract measurements from the photographs which software can then turn into dramatic animated 3D models.

It was a 21st century version of what Ruskin had done with his own drawings and commissioning other artists to provide examples for him.

Dan is keen on having a conversation, as he calls it, with specialists in other disciplines.

Geologists, he says, are always thinking with a particularly long timescale..useful in a world where everything is so short term.

For the Ruskin show, Dan’s camera on the drone created photographic data which was then used to derive massive amounts of GPS focusing points. These in turn create the 3D models from which the films are created, within the computer.

Dan Holdsworth is using technology to expand our perceptions of the world, giving the viewer an almost X-ray of the landscape. He calls it “a sense of transparency”.

IN RUSKIN’S FOOTSTEPS IN THE ALPS The Bristol-based Royal Academician Emma Stibbon showed striking new work in York and Kendal.

EMMA STIBBON says:

I chose to work in Chamonix for the exhibition commission. I read Ruskin’s essay The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, and I was also made aware of the early daguerreotypes that Ruskin took with his manservant Frederick Crawley of the Mer de Glace in June 1854, when it was literally a sea of ice.

I hadn’t seen them before.

I went back on the exact date that Ruskin had been there. And actually in the nine years since I’d last been there it was unrecognisable, which was a shock. Since Ruskin’s photograph the glacier has retreated by at least two kilometres.

I made a cyanotype, an early photographic process. My natural inclination is to draw, but I thought a photograph would be better to capture the accuracy of where the ice is now.

Ruskin readily embraced new technology, though he dropped photography after a while: he thought the human eye and the focus of drawing was more interesting.

I had to learn how to make cyanotypes, but it isn’t difficult: you do the exposure with the negative on top of the photo-sensitized paper under a sheet of glass in the sun and then you wash it down and the image magically appears: it is cyan blue.

I could have done a digital image that might have been more faithful.

But I wanted it to have a sense of atmosphere, and something of the melancholy of looking at that place now which is—I feel— an indicator of where we are with climate change.

The major part of the commission was also making three large-scale black ink on paper drawings.

Ruskin drew not just to make art but to really investigate what he was looking at, to understanding the world. Ruskin’s knowledge of science and theology put him in touch with what was happening around him and he went against the grain in railing against the industrial revolution. Most Victorian scientists embraced it but

THEN: The Mer de Glace, Chamonix, Mont Blanc Massif in June 1854 daguerreotype by John Ruskin and Frederick Crawley © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

NOW: Emma Stibbon’s cyanotype from the same viewpoint in June 2018 © Emma Stibbon, courtesy of Alan Cristea Gallery Ruskin went out on a limb. His visualisation of the world through drawing is what gives him credibility, his rigorous factual observation.

I think that Ruskin was the first environmentalist, because of the way

that he recognised and bravely spoke out against what was happening.

Looking and drawing..it is that engagement with the environment that galvanises us to take action.

Emma Stibbon talked to Peter Day 19

Stormy Weather Peter Miller surveys the exhibitions Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud at York Art Gallery in March to June 2019 and at Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal, from July to October 2019 SUZANNE Fagence Cooper and Richard Johns are to be congratulated on producing thought-provoking and beautiful exhibitions to mark the bicentenary of Ruskin’s birth. They garnered laudatory reviews in the UK and around the world and it was also a popular success, boosting attendance figures at both York and Abbot Hall.

They were over three years in the making; their quality was testimony to the care taken with every aspect of their makeup. Suzanne Fagence Cooper is a writer, curator and researcher with two Ruskin books published last year; Richard Johns lectures in the history of art at York University.

The shows consisted of over 100 exhibits that looked at the artistic relationship between Ruskin and his great hero of landscape painting, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud explored the interconnected themes of environmental change and mental wellbeing through the work of the 19th century’s two most influential artists.

To place them in a contemporary context, the curators commissioned the artist Emma Stibbon R.A. to produce three magnificent Alpine views which were infused with a Ruskinian sensibility and brilliantly complemented Ruskin’s lifelong fascination with geology and the structure of mountains.

She had also done a number of photographic studies at Aiguilles and Mer de Glace, Chamonix which, shown alongside photographs of 150 years ago, were a dramatic demonstration of the retreat of the glaciers under the influence of global warming. There was also a dramatic video installation showing clouds and sunlight shaping and reshaping over Lake Coniston at the water’s edge at Brantwood.

John Ruskin was a complicated and many-sided figure. He was the only child of wealthy parents; his father was the largest importer of sherry into Victorian England. His mother was a fervent Christian; by the time he was in his teens Ruskin knew the Bible by heart.

He came to national prominence in 1843 with the publication of Modern Painters. There he presented Turner as a greater and more truthful interpreter of landscape than his much-admired forbears in the Western tradition such as Claude Lorrain.

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The book immediately established him, at the age

John Ruskin 1879. Watercolour by Sir Hubert von Herkomer © NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

of 24, as the foremost art critic of his generation. He went on to promote the young pre-Raphaelite painters, applauding their meticulous observation of Nature. He wrote four more volumes of Modern Painters over the next 17 years.

The exhibitions examined in detail Turner’s influence on Ruskin. Ruskin never knew Turner well but he was a keen collector of his work. Of his Constance, a beautiful watercolour which Ruskin initially bought from the artist in 1847 for 80gns, Ruskin wrote: “The day I brought that drawing home to Denmark Hill was one of the happiest in my life.” Ruskin kept it until the day he died in 1900; it hung in his bedroom above his bed. It is now in York Art Gallery.

The exhibitions explored a number of ways that Ruskin responded to the natural world, including geology, meteorology, trees, mountains, clouds and sunsets. This was made clearer by the hang at the Abbot

Hall Gallery where the seven rooms enabled the various themes to be grouped together. In the York show the small watercolours were rather lost in the scale of the three big rooms. The room in Abbot Hall devoted to cloud studies included work by Alexander Cozens, Thomas Lindsay and John Constable who shared a wide interest in the formation of clouds in the age of Romanticism.

The pharmaceutical chemist Luke Howard was the first to address the nomenclature of clouds in his essay on The Modification of Clouds, published in 1803. There were examples of drawings by Ruskin in which he was copying the work of Turner. Also displayed was Italy: a Poem

by Samuel Rogers (1830) with engravings after Turner which first brought Turner’s work to the notice of the 11-year-old Ruskin.

But from the 1870’s Ruskin’s world entered a darker phase. He endured periods of depression and psychotic episodes; he was probably what today would be called “bipolar”. His first seriously disabling attack was in 1878; the York exhibition York opened with Hubert von Herkomer’s sensitive watercolour portrait of 1879 of Ruskin’s drawn face after enduring this first extended period of psychotic illness, following the death of Rosa La Touche and the stresses of the Whistler trial.

Ruskin had, in addition, become fundamentally opposed to Victorian capitalist greed and the Manchester School of Free Trade and Liberal Economics. He hated the way that people’s lives were diminished and made miserable by the quest for profit. His powerful writings of the 1860s and 1870s such as Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera were a major influence on the development of the early Labour movement. Today his influence is on the rise as an ecologist and early observer of climate change.

He was one of the first to realise how industrialisation was damaging our environment. Ruskin was able to observe this through changes to sunsets as he looked westward from Brantwood, his home in the Lake District from 1870.

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, a late work published in 1884, was a passionate polemic against the damage that industrialisation was doing to our planet. These themes were explored throughout the exhibitions and they underlined the continued relevance of Ruskin’s ideas for the modern world. They also showed how his influence extended to other artists of the 19th and 20th century, illustrated in the York exhibition by examples from the Gallery’s collection. The exhibitions

Detail of JMW Turner’s The Passage of Mount St Gothard, from the Centre of the Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), 1804.

ABBOT HALL GALLERY © LAKELAND ARTS TRUST

were accompanied by an attractive catalogue, Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud (Paul Holberton £20). This included an excellent series of short essays by writers, including Looking for Turner by the actor Timothy Spall; The Storm at Night by Howard Hull; Copying Turner by Stephen Wildman; Cloud Perspective by Caroline Arscott; The Streams of Time by Robert Macfarlane, The Artist as Witness by Emma Stibbon, and Stuart Eagles on 42nd Street’s Ruskin Land project.

The focus of Ruskin studies in 2019 has been on his concern for the environment. As such he has won a substantial new audience, particularly among young people. Interest in Ruskin and his writing is arguably higher now than at any time since the late 19th century.

The York and Abbot Hall exhibitions resulted in record attendances in both venues, as did those in London and Sheffield. It will be interesting to see how Ruskin studies develop in the years to follow.

PETER MILLER is The Guild’s Director of Publications.

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Two Days of Ruskin at the National Gallery THE GUILD had a considerable presence at a stimulating conference at the National Gallery in London in September.

It is an institution with which John Ruskin (as with so many others) had a complicated relationship. Apart from his criticisms of the organisation, he was also charged with bringing some sense of order to the vast bequest of paintings and notebooks to the nation of JMW Turner in 1857-8. He did so with characteristic energy and (it must be said) waywardness.

The idea of this bicentenary conference originated with Companion Janet Barnes, formerly curator of the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield, the first director of York Museums Trust, and a long-standing director of the Guild of St George until 2017. The organisation of the event was shared with Susanna Avery-Quash, Research Curator in the History of Collecting at the National Gallery, and it was financially supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. The conference title, Art for the Nation: John Ruskin, Art Education and Social Change, was wide-reaching, but there was room for even more topics in a packed and very stimulating two days, opened by the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi. He spoke of John Ruskin’s concern for the influence of art on our wellbeing: “not a word he would have used”.

Companion Professor Dinah Birch from the University of Liverpool started proceedings with a riveting examination of Ruskin’s Victorian readership.

She showed how Ruskin’s mind and the way he expressed himself was shaped by his mother’s evangelical religion and by the Romanticism of Wordsworth, enshrined on the title page of volume 5 of Modern Painters.

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She mentioned the considerable financial outlay that reading Ruskin required of his early followers, and the way that he later found new ways of communicating with them: new methods of reproducing pictures and the rise of the railway bookstall, with (of course) their “railway born and bred” users. “Those who read him found themselves changed,” she summed up. “That was true for the Victorians, and it’s true for us.”

The cascade of ideas and insights continued. Ruskin’s disdain for Henry’s Cole’s South Kensington concept of “useful” art education was examined by Anthony Burton, himself for many years at the V & A. The awkward relationship between Ruskin and Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery was discussed by Susanna Avery-Quash, arguments centring on the then emerging topics of art history and managing the arts.

Companion Professor John Holmes of Birmingham University talked about Ruskin and the Oxford Museum, the subject of his Ruskin Lecture at the Guild annual meeting in 2018. And Louise Pullen, curator of the Ruskin Collection and of the 2019 exhibitions at 2 Temple Place and the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, told the story of the creation of the Walkley Museum in 1875: The Joy of Pretty Things to inspire the city’s workers.

Other topics included Cynthia Brown’s examination of Ruskin’s advice to Leicester City Council who were seeking to open an art gallery in 1880, a subject close to her heart: she is a local historian specialising in Leicestershire oral history. She mentioned Ruskin bemourning what he saw as popular taste as evidenced in Frith’s painting Derby Day: “Everybody is interested in jockeys, harlots, mountebanks and men about town, nobody in saints, heroes, kings”.

There was a fine coda to the first day of the conference, when the leading Ruskin specialist and man of letters Robert Hewison delivered the 2019 Ruskin Foundation Lecture. It was entitled Ruskin To-Day after the umbrella organisation he is chairman of, founded at the time of the centenary of Ruskin’s death in 2000 and in continued existence, despite its informality. (The Guild is part of it.) His lecture was a rousing survey of the relevance of Ruskin’s ideas and the need for them in Britain and the world today, particularly in education.

After a day of sweeping views of Ruskin, Saturday began with a tour de force examination of one tiny piece of his writing by the novelist, teacher and Guild Companion Jacqueline Yallop, formerly a director of the Guild. She concentrated on a passage from The Stones of Venice reproduced on a page and a half of A4 paper in which he invited his readers “And now come with me” on a journey down the river Brenta towards Venice.

A melancholy journey it turns out to be, and Jacqueline Yallop scrutinised the dreamlike qualities of this extraordinary piece of Ruskinite prose, potent with desolation and darkness even though the end of the journey is his once beloved city. But why does he invite us on such a grimly described trip, such a personal journey? Not for our benefit, she thought, but for his own: “If we go with him, he is no longer alone.”

After that sobering launch of day two of the conference, there was another cascade of ideas: on JR’s use of and scepticism about the early art historian Giorgio Vasari; on Ruskin’s highly opinionated guide to the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, from Companion Paul Tucker. He also spoke about Ruskin’s annual rushed-out Notes commentating on the Royal Academy

“Devoid of decency”: Guido Reni’s Susanna in Room 31

THERE were two illuminating non platform events for conference participants.

Susanna Avery-Quash led a scamper through the National Gallery in pursuit of six paintings of Ruskinian significance: ones he loved or hated, a tour devised by Robyn Hayes, an art history student at the University of Plymouth.

JR castigated Guido Reni’s Susanna and the Elders now in Room 31 “devoid alike of art and decency”.

In Room 15 we swivelled between Claude’s Queen of Sheba (thumbs down: the quay was “egregiously out of perspective”) and Turner’s not altogether dissimilar Dido Building Carthage (thumbs up).

And this lightening tour ended with Tintoretto, whose work so entranced JR that he pressed unsuccessfully for the National Gallery to buy two more.

We just had time to marvel at Christ washing the feet of the Disciples, which the Gallery bought in 1882. Ruskin was enraged that a painting by the “very

Annual Exhibitions in London in the 1850s, when the RA was housed in the east wing of the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square.

Companion Susanne Fagence Cooper played a big part in the bicentenary, writing two books (reviewed elsewhere) and co-curating the exhibition Ruskin Turner & the Storm Cloud in York and Kendal. She spoke about the development of Ruskin’s legacy since 1969, the topic of her latest book.

The New York artist, architect and preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos told the conference how he used liquid latex to peal off centuries of accumulated grime in places such as Westminster Hall in London and the Doge’s Palace in Venice to create monumental thin casts which hang in situ (and in one case in the Whitworth in Manchester). Inspired by Ruskin, this ongoing series of art works is called The Ethics of Dust,

inferior” David Teniers the Younger was given more prominence in the Gallery than this “Tintoret”.

The alternative lunchtime escapade was a visit to the elegant National Gallery library led by the Research Centre Manager Alan Crookham. He had dug out a tableful of Ruskin-related items from the archives.

This included the minutes of the Trustees meeting in 1862 at which it was reported that Ruskin had offered a bequest of some of his property to the Gallery. The gift was never made, and the word “contemplated” has been added before “bequest” in a later hand.

Also on display was Ruskin’s 1862 letter to his colleague Ralph Wornum confirming that the “obscene” drawings found when Ruskin undid one of the parcels in the Turner Bequest had been burnt in his presence in 1858 “for the sake of Turner’s reputation and for your own peace.” Whether the drawings were actually burnt is now a matter of argument.

seeing dust as part of the whole cycle of life. And there was more about the Whitworth’s Ruskin involvement from its vigorous director Alistair Hudson. He outlined a busy programme for the Whitworth’s highly imaginative local and regional involvement: art embedded in the world, very much inspired by John Ruskin.

The Conference ended with Andrew Hill of the Financial Times, author of the bicentenary book Ruskinland, and a Companion with much influence on business thinking. He was sure that Ruskin shaped our world, and is still doing so. An energising end to an enlightening two days.

PETER DAY Films of the final presentations of the second day and Robert Hewison’s 2019 Ruskin Foundation lecture can be viewed via The Guild’s website.

NOTE

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RUSKIN IN MANCHESTER IT IS TRUE that John Ruskin hated Manchester. But in its people, he saw a source of inspiration. As the 19th century moved into the 20th, residents of Manchester who acknowledged Ruskin’s influence included art philanthropists, collectors and curators; municipal activists and politicians; religious leaders and eminent writers. But in the intervening century, Ruskin in Manchester faded.

Then, in 2019, as bicentenary celebrations took hold globally, Manchester joined the party– and the Guild of St George played a significant part in helping to revive Ruskin in Manchester. Over the course of the bicentenary, Manchester hosted four Ruskin exhibitions and offered more than 30 events under the umbrella of Ruskin in Manchester, with many additional events delivered by The Whitworth in support of its exhibition.

Rachel Dickinson describes a Bicentenary Festival We used these to shape the festival and the types of events it would offer. These are some of the events which featured Guild Companions: Ruskin’s Manchester lectures offered an important historical link, and we wanted the people of Manchester to have a feel of what it might have been like to hear Ruskin lecture. As Master of the Guild, Clive Wilmer represented a direct link to Ruskin, who had been the first Master. So, in June, Clive below gave the address at a Ruskinian Choral Evensong held at Manchester Cathedral in celebration of Ruskin and his influence.

Planning for events in Manchester to mark Ruskin’s bicentenary began as a conversation between the Guild – represented by Ruskin scholar and then Secretary, Stuart Eagles, and me – and Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in June 2017. Refurbished and relaunched in 2014, EGH had approached the Guild to explore possibilities for working together. Ruskin’s bicentenary seemed an ideal opportunity. As the Guild’s Director for Education, I took on an additional volunteer role as Coordinator of Ruskin in Manchester.

Encouraged by the success of the existing Guild projects Ruskin in Sheffield and Ruskin in Wyre, The Festival of Ruskin in Manchester was chosen as the branding for this project. The first planning meetings were held at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections in December 2017 and January 2018.

The museum of the university where I teach, Special Collections, was the first venue to commit to hold a Ruskin exhibition, which I guest curated. The initial planning meetings included representation from many of the city’s cultural institutions, including 42nd Street/ The Horsfall, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Central Library, The Portico Library, and The Whitworth. In the end, these partners were joined by The Big Draw/John Ruskin Prize, The Holden Gallery (of MMU’s Manchester School of Art), and Manchester Cathedral.

Manchester’s historical response to Ruskin was the key inspiration as we planned the festival: how could we take the story of Ruskin and Manchester in the past and use this idea to engage, excite and educate people in the present? So we looked at a range of historical aspects:

-The lectures Ruskin gave in Manchester, - Quotations about Manchester from across his writing, -Architecture which exhibits Ruskinian influence, -The first Ruskin Society, -The first exhibition dedicated to Ruskin, held in 1904.

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This special service was adapted from the one that had been held in Venice to mark Ruskin’s birthday, where Clive had also given the address. The readings were by me and by Marion McClintock, known to many Companions as she has been involved in the Ruskin Seminars at Lancaster University for 25 years.

We were very fortunate that Companion, actor and art historian Paul O’Keeffe was available to take on the role of Mr Ruskin and deliver two key Manchester lectures as near as we could manage to the actual location and dates on which they were originally given.

On the evening of 8th July, Paul gave The Discovery and Application of Art at the atmospheric Portico Library, a block away from the Athenaeum where Ruskin first delivered the lecture on 10th July 1857.

Paul then performed the second of the pair published in A Joy Forever (and its Price in the Market), The Accumulation and Distribution of Art, at Manchester Art Gallery as a lunch-time performance on 13th July. This was the very date on which Ruskin gave it, and in a space adjacent to the Athenaeum, surrounded by period paintings. In each of these venues and mediated through Paul’s performance, the audiences had a unique sense of

what it would have been like to hear Ruskin lecture in his own time.

A month earlier, in June, Manchester Art Gallery was also host to a capacity crowd of more than 100 people who came to hear a lecture by Companion Andrew Hill, the Financial Times journalist, who also

Collection, and from the private collections of Companions. As a thank you to the Guild for its support of Ruskin in Manchester, Companions who attended the 2019 AGM at Sheffield in November were given a copy of the exhibition catalogue.

In the Bicentenary year, the Guild also partnered with the Big Draw to deliver the fifth John Ruskin Prize for Art. Hosted by The Holden Gallery, of MMU’s Manchester School of Art, the exhibition ran from 12th July to 24th August. More on page 26.

The Festival of Ruskin in Manchester has morphed into Ruskin in Manchester. The intention is to offer events beyond the Bicentenary. Ruskin has returned to Manchester.

DESPITE his discomfort with the city (or perhaps because of it) several of Ruskin’s most notable ideas were first given voice in Manchester : signed copies of his new book Ruskinland (left). His lecture subject was Ruskin Today: How a Victorian Visionary Shapes the Way We Live, Work and See the World’, delivered in front of Ford Maddox Brown’s Work (1865), so that the audience was able to reflect on the original painting while listening to Andrew speak about its and Ruskin’s relevance today.

From The Unity of Art, delivered to Manchester School of Art on 22nd February 1859, and published in The Two Paths: FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

From The Accumulation and Distribution of Art delivered on July 10th 1857 at the Manchester Athenaeum and published in A Joy Forever (and its Price in the Market): Wherever you see want, or misery, or degradation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error. It is not accident.

To various work; To easy work; To lasting work. whenever we spend money for whatever purpose, we set people to work..our selfishness and folly, or our virtue and prudence, are shown, not by our spending money, but by our spending it for the wrong or the right thing.

From The Discovery and Application of Art delivered on July 13th 1857 at the Manchester Athenaeum and published in A Joy Forever (and its Price in the Market): We, as we live and work, are to be always thinking of those who are to come after us.

When I began to plan the exhibition held at MMU’s Special Collections above, I took two lectures as key points of inspiration: his 1859 lecture The Unity of Art, which was first delivered to the Manchester School of Art (now part of MMU), and his The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 1884, in which he referred to “Manchester devil’s darkness”. Ruskin’s Manchester: Devil’s Darkness to Beacon City ran from 24th June to 23rd August. Many of the loans came from the Guild’s

Fancy what we should have had around us now, if, instead of quarrelling and fighting over their work, the nations had aided each other in their work.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, act more for preservation and less for production.

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Changemakers TWELVE-hundred and sixty entries; more than 3,000 artworks. The John Ruskin Prize is the fastest growing art competition in the country.

And when the judges had selected 41 shortlisted artists from all those submissions, the show in the almost 130-year-old Holden Gallery at Manchester School of Art was a triumphant success. The Prize was started in 2012 by the Guild of St George and the Big Draw campaign.

1930s railway poster, very much unlike the familiar, muted, British watercolour. The painting is called Brexit and the couple—seen from behind—are Asian, gazing at an uncertain future.

Shanti Panthal grew up in a village in western India, studied art in Mumbai and then continued his studies in London; he has been in Britain ever since and now lives and works in north west London. He chose watercolour early on in his career; he says his flat was too small for larger works. “Working over 35 years,” he says, “I’ve almost revolutionised the watercolour medium. But people don’t believe it’s watercolour.”

He paints slowly, layering the paint so that it saturates the paper and glows with substance; it takes five months for a single work. One of his paintings hangs next to a Francis Bacon in a public collection. “Most watercolours would get lost,” he says. “Nobody has really pushed the medium far enough.”

THE 5TH JOHN RUSKIN PRIZE

There was a striking diversity of responses to the Ruskinian theme Agent of Change, in many media. A tall tarred hut like those used for storing fishing nets was full of seaweed specimens collected by Duncan Cameron. From Walthamstow in East London came Hilary Powell and Co’s elaborate multimedia installation about cancelling debt, The Bank Job.

Pip Woolf exhibited the meticulous working out of a large scale open air project to place a woollen pathway in the hills of Wales: Woollenline was an artistic response to climate change. Danny Treacy’s Rituals was a suit of armour made from shoe soles collected from the River Thames.

And there were dozens more eye-catching and illuminating ideas and artworks. Any of them would have been a plausible winner; it was a very exciting show. Revealing the final choice of the seven-strong selection panel, the Master Clive Wilmer noted that Ruskin would have abhorred the idea of a competition.

Even so, the Master Elect Rachel Dickinson who was one of the judges noted that Ruskin would have been pleased by the number of entries that captured key concerns now, including the environment, mental health, racial equality, economic justice, the plight of migrants, the schism that is Brexit. She said: “This exhibition is about the power of art to help us see the world around us. It is very John Ruskin.”

And when the winners were announced, a triumphant surprise. With works in so many media to choose from, the Jury’s No 1 and No. 2 choices were both done in watercolour..highly appropriate for a prize bearing the name of such a distinguished watercolourist, but (I think) completely coincidental.

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The fact that they are both watercolours was quite difficult to grasp, at first viewing. The painting by the Second Prize Winner, Shanti Panchal, is of a couple standing looking at the sea gazing on a cliff edge like that of the White Cliffs of Dover. It is done in strong blocks of colour, and has something of the impact of a

He painted his Brexit watercolour specifically for this competition, with its uncertainty about the future. “Agent of Change is happening right in front of us,” he says.

“This exhibition is so unique, the diversity of it; Ruskin would have really loved what is happening now. You can work with the heart as much as the head, and art now is practiced only by hand.”

The John Ruskin First Prize was an even more surprising watercolour: an installation as big as a room created by Juliette Losq in her studio on the romantically-named Eel Pie Island in the river Thames near Richmond. It is called Proscenium, and it is based on the optical device called a “teleorama”: layers of recessing paper creating a 3D artwork.

Juliette Losq has meticulously recreated a wooden structure she found along a disused railway line in Finsbury in north London which has now become a designated graffiti area. She explains: “Through the process of making very detailed large-scale interpretations of these sites I am in a sense preserving something that is considered unworthy of preservation.”

“I am drawing attention to their ephemerality while at the same time “fixing” them at a particular moment of collapse/decay/decline.” And she has turned what might be considered an urban eyesore into something beautiful. She told me that the images the installation is based on are several years old. “It won’t look like this now,” she said. “It’s a place that’s in constant flux: new graffiti, new vegetation, it’s always changing.”

“Watercolour on paper is my preferred medium,” she says. How else does it relate to Ruskin? I asked. “He

often painted details..crumbling walls and buildings. This is based on a technique I’ve invented that is incredibly labour intensive, building up the pictures in layers so that you can add a wider tonal range and much more

TOP: In the Holden Gallery, Clive Wilmer presents the first prize.

MIDDLE: Juliette Losq, First Prize winner.

detail.”

People walking through this spot will probably find it mundane or grim, but Juliette Losq considers it beautiful.

And as for the graffiti, “Well sometimes it’s the only thing that reminds you what century we’re in”. And the little bit of decayed North London she has recreated in watercolour sticks in the mind long after experiencing it.

The John Ruskin Student Prize went to Chao Wang, who is now studying photography at the Royal College of Art in London after getting a degree in Architecture at the University of Toronto. His winning exhibit was a clever monochrome videotape called Walk With Me, a stroll through a bleached post-apocalyptic world.

Those three artists caught the attention of the Prize judges, but there were many other very plausible contenders, watercolourists or not. The John Ruskin Prize is growing into a very significant biennial event.

PETER DAY

Shanti Panchal, Second Prize.

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Ruskin at the Huntington Library Sara Atwood and Jim Spates report on the conference John Ruskin: Nineteenth-Century Prophet, Twenty-First Century Visionary IN December 2019, 12 Ruskin scholars from North America and Europe came together for a stimulating weekend of presentations and discussion at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The conference was a fitting capstone to the Bicentenary celebrations and drew over 100 attendees. As well as the talks, the event included an art exhibit, Ruskin and his Frenemies, based on The Huntington’s Ruskin collection, and a performance of Sarah Rodgers’s composition for tenor and string quartet of Ruskin’s story The King of the Golden River.

Jim Spates, who had convened the conference in partnership with the Huntington staff, opened the first of four sessions, Ruskin and the Modern. His talk Why Ruskin? A Radical and Humane Visionary was a wideranging, incisive, introduction to Ruskin; it stressed his origins as a celebrated art critic who, sensing his writings were not achieving the transformative effect he desired, became in mid-life a powerful critic of society.

As he traced Ruskin’s evolution, Jim emphasised the impact Ruskin had on his contemporaries; he concluded by making a strong case for his enduring importance today.

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Geneva from the Rhone: watercolour by John Ruskin 1842 or 1846 from the Huntington Library exhibition

to be associated with the margins of intellectual or cultural orthodoxy. The gendered nature of his ethics and values, Dinah said, provided the “framework of feeling” that underpins his work, and is fundamental to understanding his significance both then and now.

In the second session, Ruskin Applied, Emma Sdegno spoke on Ruskin’s Language of Culture: Framing his Notions of Gothic and Renaissance. Arguing that his first meaningful encounter with Gothic occurred during his “transformative journey” of 1845, Emma traced the ways in which this experience led to “a new way of looking” by drawing his attention to the domestic origins of Gothic and its vital contribution to workers’ imagination. Pointing to his discovery of Tintoretto that same year, Emma traced the important connections Ruskin discovered between the Gothic ethos and the Venetian master.

Speaking on The Things that lead to Life: Ruskin the Educator, Sara Atwood examined Ruskin’s educational principles and practice. She spoke of the various teaching positions Ruskin held, of his opposition to conventional pedagogy, and of his vision for an alternative approach to learning. She suggested that his ideas, simultaneously progressive and traditional, still possessed great significance for modern debates on education.

Gray Brechin unearthed surprising connections between Ruskin’s ideas and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s America in his talk Necessitous Men are Not Free Men: Ruskin, the New Deal, and the Settlement House Movement. He showed how Ruskin’s thought influenced the progressive ideals the Roosevelts championed, which became the underpinning for social reform efforts like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Gray described the New Deal as “a comprehensive moral programme” concerned, among other things, with integrating the arts into life.

In her compelling paper Ruskin and Women: A New Appraisal, Dinah Birch argued that an understanding of Ruskin’s views of women was vitally important.

Beginning with his mother’s teaching, Ruskin was early accustomed to feminine values, the powerful influence of which appear throughout his work. Dinah argued that his readers, many of whom were women to whom he gave considerable support and encouragement, tended

Sandra Kemp shared her experience and expertise as the newly appointed Director of The Ruskin in her talk The Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future. She said this critical collection of Ruskiniana, the only one that offers a “360 degree view” of his life, thought, and work, has now been secured in perpetuity by Lancaster University. She offered attendees a glimpse of recent exhibitions, showing many beautiful images from the

The speakers: Gabriel Meyer, David Judson, Gray Brechin, Emma Sdegno, Howard Hull, Jim Spates, Dinah Birch, Kateri Ewing, Sandra Kemp, Rachel Dickinson, Sara Atwood, Ted Bosley and Steve Hindle of the Huntington

Collection, and described the rich mix of scholarship, creative collaboration, and public outreach that are revitalising The Ruskin for future generations.

The third conference session Ruskin in California opened with Gabriel Meyer’s Ruskin and The California Dream. After reviewing the histories of Ruskin-influenced communities in the US (including Ruskin, Florida—long defunct—and The Roycroft Community in upstate New York—still functioning), he concentrated on the long-underappreciated influence of Ruskin’s thought on the arts and crafts movements of California. He told of the origin of The Ruskin Club and Hillside Club in the Bay Area. He then described the creation of the still-thriving Ruskin Art Club of Los Angeles, emphasising how important its influence was to the region.

Ted Bosley continued the theme of Ruskin’s regional influence in The House Beautiful: Truth to Nature in the Work of Greene and Greene. He told the history of The Gamble House, the architects’ greatest achievement and a National Landmark (in nearby Pasadena), and of how the Greene brothers understood perfectly Ruskin’s insistence that great architecture must be grounded in a love of nature and the thoughtful use of its products.

Ted showed how the brothers’ understanding shaped every aspect of their design.

The session ended with David Johnson’s talk Ruskin and Stained Glass: A Century of Creative Work, tracing the three-generation family history of Judson Studios, a firm now well into its second century. Judson Studios has created some of the most beautiful and admired stained glass in America. David stressed how important it is for an art form to evolve and showed his audience some of the firm’s most recent and innovative work. It was proof of Ruskin’s dictum that no one he influenced would ever be a “Ruskinian”, but would, rather, absorb what they

liked best and then go and create on their own.

Kateri Ewing began the last session Ruskin and the Future by telling us her own story of Learning How to Draw from Ruskin. Always interested in art, one day Kateri began reading his Elements of Drawing, completing all the exercises as he recommended. Slowly she gained in competence and confidence. As she spoke, she showed us the evolution of her work. Currently, she is Artist-in-Residence at The Roycroft Campus, the author of a much-praised book on learning how to draw, and teaches hundreds of students via the lessons she offers regularly on her website. Ruskin, we all thought, would be delighted.

The penultimate talk was given by Rachel Dickinson, newly appointed as Master of the Guild of St. George. She spoke on Ruskin’s Guild of St. George: Then and Now. After a tribute to Clive Wilmer, she went on to tell the story of the Guild’s formation out of Ruskin’s desire to create a new and more humane social order. She showed how Ruskin’s vision, almost a century and a half later, continues to shape the modern Guild. She spoke of several compelling Guild projects.

Howard Hull delivered the final presentation, Ruskin in the 21st Century: A Prophecy. At the heart of his moving talk was a reprise of Ruskin’s great series of lectures delivered in 1858: The Two Paths. The argument to be made now, said Howard, was the same as Ruskin recognised then: that the world stood at a crossroads.

One path led to destruction and the denigration of all that has proven best in human life, while the other led to creativity and elevation of the human spirit. We can elect, he said, either the wealth that is life or the illth of acquisitiveness and domination. Despite many negative portents, he said, the chance remains high that we will choose the road of life, especially if we let Ruskin be our guide on that path.

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RUSKIN AT THE RUSKIN WE ARE deeply grateful to the It explored how his ideas could Companions of the Guild of St. In Bicentenary Year, help us shape a better future. With George for the substantial its selection of drawings, paintings a highly significant contribution which has enabled and models, daguerreotypes and development for The Ruskin—Library, Museum lecture diagrams, as well as and Research Centre to purchase samples from his shells and The Ruskin at Lancaster The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection. geology collections, and responses University. By Sandra Kemp, from contemporary artists, Ruskin: The Collection is the most complete collection of Ruskin Museum of the Near Director, The Ruskin material in the world. It stands Future positioned Ruskin as a among the most comprehensive collections associated compelling educator in whom learning, teaching and with any artist or writer. It was assembled in the early research connect with the pulse of daily life.

20th century by the social reformer and Liberal MP J Ruskin’s works, combining critical thinking with Howard Whitehouse, the founder of Bembridge School sensitivity and creativity, challenge us to re-imagine and on the Isle of Wight. The former Master of the Guild, re-interpret our understanding of the world: to look James Dearden, was for some 40 years curator of the closely, see clearly, and imagine freely. It was a Collection during its Bembridge years. resounding success, attracting over 1000 visitors from a The purchase has secured for the nation more than range of age groups and from across the UK, Europe 1,500 drawings, 500 prints, 7,400 letters, 29 volumes of and Asia in the first two months, and was extended until manuscript diaries and 350 books from Ruskin’s own the end of February 2020 to mark the end of the library. There are 125 daguerreotypes, made under bicentenary.

Ruskin’s direction at a time when this technology was in Our vision for The Ruskin is to be as ambitious as its infancy, and the largest number of Ruskin’s Ruskin himself. Ruskin once said: ‘‘The really precious magnificent lecture diagrams in the world, some unseen things are thought and sight, not pace”. Ruskin helps us since Ruskin used them himself in his lectures. Every to see, in his own words, with “heartsight”. He aspect of Ruskin’s wide-ranging interests is represented, campaigned for education for all. Our linked remit as a from religion and the arts to political economy to library, museum and research centre will enable us to geology and the environment. become a model for a combined resource of this kind.

To celebrate the purchase of the Collection, The Through contemporary exhibition practice alongside Ruskin re-launched in September 2019 with the events, learning and engagement activities, we will exhibition Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future, co-curated expand the value of this unique collection. by myself and Howard Hull, Director, Brantwood. It Research will drive our exhibition and public was generously funded by the Murray Foundation. The programme, shaped by a revolution in public access to launch exhibition featured the plaster cast from the the Collection through our plans for collaboration, Basilica of San Marco loaned by the Guild, and drew digitisation and widened participation. As part of our visitors into a dazzling material universe, establishing a continuing care for the Collection, we will further powerful connection between Ruskin’s era and our own. enhance the online catalogue prior to the full digitisation of the Collection, and with initial funding from the National Manuscript Conservation Trust, we have launched a campaign to raise funds to preserve Ruskin’s lecture diagrams.

Our work will be enriched by increased public involvement. We are creating a Volunteer programme and developing a series of exciting initiatives, ranging from live performances and late-night viewings to workshop labs and appearances at local art and jazz festivals. We will work to cultivate the curiosity and “heartsight” of all age groups.

We look forward to welcoming The Guild to The Ruskin for the annual Companions meeting on the 21st November 2020.

Ideas for a better future 30

SANDRA KEMP

A Birthday Wreath in Venice VENICE, the city that so inspired John Ruskin, did not forget the Bicentenary.

The Guardian Grando of the Scuola San Rocco, Franco Posocco, has recently become a Companion of the Guild. He and his colleagues devised a plan to place a wreath on the memorial to Ruskin on the outside wall of the Pensione La Calcina, on the Zattere in Dorsoduro. It is where Ruskin is said to have stayed in the 1870s.

The wreath-hanging in February 2019 was preceded by a service of Prayer Book Matins in Ruskin’s honour at St George’s Anglican Church, with an address by Clive Wilmer. The Guild backed the initiative by funding the visit of the Master and three other Guild representatives: a director, Howard Hull, Ruth Nutter, the leader of Ruskin in Sheffield, and one younger Companion. This bursary was awarded to Malaika Cunningham, who has been very active in the Sheffield project.

The visit coincided with two days of rain and the flooding now so familiar to Venice. On Saturday the group visited in particular the Scuola San Rocco with its 62 Tintorettos and the Scuola di San Giorgio, where the Carpaccio painting of St George and the Dragon hangs. Both institutions were important to Ruskin in his conception of the Guild.

On Sunday morning the church was packed with at least 80 people, about a third of them Italian. There were English speaking members of the congregation, supporters of the city’s Circolo Italo-Britannico and from Ca’ Foscari University, and also passing visitors from places such as Singapore and New England.

There were two very Ruskinian readings from the Bible. Genesis 28 (Jacob’s ladder) and the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew 20). There were hymns by George Herbert, St Francis of Assisi and the cofounder of the National Trust, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. Rawnsley’s hymn The prophets cease from out the land, the counsellors are gone was originally written for Ruskin’s funeral in Coniston in 1900.

The starting point of Clive Wilmer’s address was the reading from Genesis quoted by Ruskin where Jacob wakes from slumber to realise that “Surely the Lord is in this place”. For Ruskin—said the Master— there was no greater human artefact than Venice, but

even Venice was not greater that the nature it was part of. The truly sacred place was nature..and not nature in general but the particular place that the listener or reader finds himself part of: Jacob’s wilderness, Venice, or the Yorkshire hills where Ruskin was delivering his celebrated lecture Traffic to the merchants of Bradford in 1864.

It was a message with much resonance in the present day, said the Master. Ruskin had told his Bradford audience; “I am trying to prove to you that not that the Church is not sacred — but that the whole Earth is”.

Clive Wilmer finished by reminding his Venice congregation of what Ruskin said in Unto This Last: “That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”

Malaika Cunningham from Sheffield summed up the experience (and the service) like this: “There we sit in a church in a sinking city whilst in between floods people flock to buy designer clothes and Venice themed fridge magnets.”

Ruskin—she said, reflecting on Clive’s sermon— saw connections between inequality, consumerism and environmental destruction, which even today many fail to acknowledge. “His vision seemed to reach into the future and his work, even now, can seem ahead of its time.”

The service was followed by short speeches from the Deputy Mayor of Venice and Franco Posocco, and afterwards the convivial wreath-hanging was stimulated by Prosecco.

Thus was Ruskin celebrated in the city he loved.

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A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION ALL GREAT ART IS PRAISE came about because it felt absolutely essential to have an event that would celebrate the 200th anniversary of Ruskin’s birth on the actual day, 8th February 2019. There were thoughts of a church service, as at Coniston on the centenary of his death on the 20th January 2000, or of commissioning a celebrity lecture. But what was really needed was something that would be both celebratory, informative about Ruskin’s life, and point to his influence today.

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How do you mark the birthday of a polymath? Robert Hewison writes about celebrating John Ruskin on the day he was born.

and I thought it would be best to have a young voice and an old voice. I was lucky enough to have been a student actor with Michael Palin, and he readily agreed.

The young voice came from 25 year-old Dan Draper, an In 2018 I had taken over as chair of Ruskin To-Day, actor friend of my daughter Greta, who is also Secretary the entirely informal forum for Ruskin organisations to Ruskin To-Day. The technically most difficult and individual enthusiasts that had been originally set element was the visual. It would be absurd not have up by Guild Companion David Barrie to co-ordinate images of and by Ruskin’s centenary Ruskin, but a mere celebrations in 2000. slide show would I like to think of it as have been dull. an entirely Ruskinian Fortunately I have organisation, because another friend, the it isn’t one. It has no brilliant video-maker constitution, no Gavin Mackinnonmembership rules, Little, who turned the and is entirely driven still images into a by good will. It continuous video proves as Ruskin background to the wrote, that performance. I hadn’t “government and codirected a show since I operation are in all left university, but things the Laws of there I was coLife”. Nobody owns ordinating actors, Ruskin, but we can all musicians and video, share him, and the biannual meetings of Dan Draper, the Coull Quartet, Michael Palin GAVIN MACKINNON-LITTLE elements that only came together for the Ruskin To-Day first time on the day of the performance. I have to say continued after 2000, until it was time to prepare for that everyone was both generous and patient in 2019. We were fortunate to be given a grant by the rehearsal, and totally focussed in performance.

Bowland Charitable Trust to set up a website where everyone who wanted to could advertise what they were There was also the question of a suitable venue. The doing to mark the bicentenary – and also to put on a Royal Academy had just completed its refurbishment of birthday event. the former Museum of Mankind, and it struck me that the lecture theatre, exquisitely designed by David One element of the evening suggested itself Chipperfield, would be just the right setting for the immediately. In 2000 the composer Sarah Rodgers had event: a lecture that was not a lecture. The Royal premiered her adaptation of The King of the Golden River Academy generously recognised the Ruskinian for tenor and string quartet, a lovely piece of music that resonances – in his lifetime Ruskin had written often would be perfect for a celebratory evening. Tenor about Royal Academy exhibitions – and we were able to Richard Edgar-Wilson and the Coull Quartet, who gave do a deal by which we put on the show, and they sold the first performance, were available, and I thought it the tickets. And then have a party afterwards. would be interesting to commission three more settings of poems by Ruskin, and use the quartet to play brief This was a one-off production, although there is a interludes when we needed to change the mood. video of the event. Perhaps one day we can re-assemble the forces involved, and I would love to do so. But The words had to be Ruskin’s, and as far as possible somehow, I don’t think we could recapture the magic of they were, although it was necessary to add the that very special day, 8th February 2019. occasional explanatory link. It fell to me to write the script, which took a broadly chronological approach – ROBERT HEWISON is an independent writer, curator, not omitting Ruskin’s mental illness and tragic passion – journalist and consultant who has held professorships at ending up with The King of the Golden River, and words Lancaster, City and Oxford Universities. A noted Ruskinian, that seemed best to sum up his message. We could he has written more than 20 books on a wide range of afford only two readers – not Ruskin impersonators – cultural subjects.

BIG DRAW JAPAN 2019

THE Big Draw reached Kyoto in the autumn of 2019 with two events, write new Companions Divya and Masa Kato. The very first Big Draw Kyoto drawing festival was held on September 22nd at Kyoto Botanical Gardens. It was sponsored by Kyoto UNESCO Association and Guild Companion Shokan Nishikawa, and led by us, Divya and Masahiro Kato of Atelier Kato Tokyo. The idea was to commemorate the bicentenary of John Ruskin and share his ideas with a new audience.

Professor Chiaki Yokoyama, of Keio University kicked off the event with an introduction to Ruskin and his approach to drawing. The artist Divya Marie Kato then guided the group in putting these ideas into practice through two drawing activities.

One was an individual and reflective drawing based on Ruskin's dictum: "If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the World. The other was a collaborative mural using

charcoal from our friends in Ruskin Land, Bewdley from our award winning, Tokyo-Bewdley Big Draw event last year! This was followed on October 27th by The Big Draw Tokyo, held in Yoyogi Park. Influenced by Kandinsky, we experimented by bringing drawing and music together in three activities: See, Feel, Flow, to celebrate creativity for well-being and 2019’s Big Draw theme: Drawn to Life.

The artist Divya Marie Kato and musician Anneliese NakaharaKnight from ALBA Music Together are long term residents of Japan. They’ve been teaching and sharing art and music for many years and are passionate about making them more widely accessible to people from all walks of life, They say: “All you’ve got to do is start with one dot or one beat!”

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AGM

2019

SHEFFIELD

VENICE and South Yorkshire were still sharing the sort of flooding that used to occur once in a lifetime during the weekend of the Guild’s 2019 Annual Meeting.

It was held—not in Ruskin’s Venice, but in Ruskin’s Sheffield— in the Millennium Centre, also home to the Ruskin Collection. It was a very wellattended AGM, elegiac but spirited as befitted the departure of Clive Wilmer as Master after 10 years at the helm.

The newest Guild Director, Howard Hull, longstanding director of Brantwood, introduced Clive on the occasion of his Ruskin Lecture. “An intellect worn lightly,” said Howard; a generosity of spirit, a wonderful soul, and above all a poet. “To see clearly is poetry.” Clive had a superb way of bringing out Ruskin’s voice when reading him aloud; he was a pretty good tour guide, and a great teacher. “A spiritual leader, inspiring people to do things, a touchpaper lighter, a man of deep faith, a great bloke”.

On a first encounter with Clive some years ago, Laurence Roussillon-Constanty from France said she had noticed his purposiveness when they talked of Ruskin. Later she watched how Clive always attended to people’s health and well-being on a spiritual level. It was the poet’s prerogative to turn chance into action.

transformed the Guild, more than doubled its membership and expanded it globally. The present— said Peter—combined something from Ruskin Land, something from Sheffield and something from Venice, where Clive had very strong connections. The two struggled with the wrapping paper, to reveal the award: a big (but not life-size) giclee print of John Bunney’s celebrated painting of the Western façade of St Marks’ Venice commissioned by John Ruskin in the 1870s and now—of course—in the Guild Collection in Sheffield. It was framed in oak from the Wyre Forest.

Replying, Clive said it was an enormously moving occasion to be saying Au Revoir. He was very proud of having led the Guild. It was possible to have good principles only if you had good feelings; so many people in the Guild had been wonderful to work with.

He mentioned new collaborators such as the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The feelings of companionship would stay with him.

The proceedings had begun with Clive’s Ruskin Lecture What the Guild is For. Much of it concerned his personal encounters with JR (see facing page), interwoven with the places and themes that had dominated Ruskin's life, in particular painting. Clive finished with these words: “TWENTY-FOUR years ago, when I signed the Roll of the Guild, I was gently mocked by certain of my friends. What good could be done against the all-powerful demons of modern life by a tiny quixotic charity founded by a crazy Victorian gentleman?

Earlier this year, the online magazine BBC Culture published a review of the Guild’s Exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing.

The headline ran: “Was this the most important man of the last 200 years?”. Provided we keep on doing without our helmets [like St George in Ruskin’s Guild symbol] and nail down the opportunities offered us by Fors, small though they may sometimes be, I think we can. do – and have done – a great deal of good.”

At the Annual Meeting itself, the Mastership was formally passed on to Rachel Dickinson. After warm welcomes which continued throughout the day, the new Master said that 2020 would be a quieter year than the momentous events of 2019. But the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Guild itself was looming in 2021.

A picture for Clive, right, presented by Peter Miller

Director Peter Miller manhandled a large rectangular parcel wrapped in brown paper onto the podium. Before allowing Clive to unwrap his farewell present, Peter said that during Clive’s 10 years as Master, he had enjoyed immensely Clive’s ability to slow things down and reflect on them. He had been tremendously hard-working, said Peter. He had 34

The Treasurer Chris Harris reported on an exceptional year of investment which he hoped would benefit the Guild in the coming five years: £311,000 of net spending, largely on the two Ruskin exhibitions at Two Temple Place in London and the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield, and on the Ruskin Collection at Lancaster.

The Treasurer said the sustainability of the Guild would be the key discussion at the Directors’ strategy meeting early in 2020.

IN HER inaugural speech, Rachel Dickinson said that Companions working together were the star story of the Guild. Sustainability was at the heart of it: in climate change and society as a whole. Symbolising the Guild's increasing internationality, she held up a model of an ancient Japanese orange: the Orange Prize presented to the Guild by the recent visitor and new Companion Ryō Yamazaki, founder of the international design group Studio-L. The “L”, she said, stands for “Life”.

Ruskin’s “Life”. Without which there is no wealth.

READING RUSKIN An extract from Clive Wilmer’s Lecture on What the Guild of St George Does JOHN RUSKIN laid down most of the principles on which the Guild is founded in Fors Clavigera, his series of letters “to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” No title of Ruskin’s, as he well knew when he chose it, is more problematic or more loaded with meanings – often contradictory ones. He understood the difficulty well enough to devote several fascinating pages to possible interpretations of the title. I want to notice just one.

The phrase comes from the Latin poet Horace. The first meaning Ruskin gives is “Fortune the nail-bearer”.

This is literal, of course. It sounds like one of those expressions you only ever find in classical translations: you read it once or twice and are none the wiser. Latin is in general much more concise than English and its vocabulary much smaller. It’s precisely its ability to bear so much implication that attracts Ruskin. Fors, he tells us, can mean three things: Force, Fortitude and Fortune.

It should be noticed that the three words include the idea of force or strength: physical force, moral force and the force of circumstance. “Clavigera” means the bearer of any one of three things: a club, a key and a nail. The meaning of the title at any time can be made by combining these different senses, and the one which concerns me today is “Fortune the Nail-bearer”.

The dictionary tells us that Fors means “chance” or “luck”: words which don’t seem a million miles from Ruskin’s “fortune” – except that fortune is not as impersonal or arbitrary as chance. And that surely reminds us of two other words: ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’, which both suggest that what happens to us is determined by powers greater than ourselves.

All five words refer to the same aspect of experience – it would once upon a time have been called hap: the things that just happen to us – for good or ill – without our choosing. Ruskin is thinking of that when he talks – as he often does – of “happiness” (as in “the greatest number of noble and happy human beings”).

Is happiness, is good fortune, something that just happens to us, or is it something we can make for ourselves? This is one of the great themes of Fors

Clavigera: the ill fortune we have brought upon ourselves and the happiness it is in our power to create.

One of the purposes of the Guild of St George is to step back from misery and create happiness.

This is where the nail-bearer comes in. If you don’t actually believe that your fate is imposed on you by the gods or the fates, you must see what happens to you simply as good luck, or recognise it as something you have made for yourself. Ruskin believes that you can transform luck into fate. You can ignore what fortune offers you, or you can take it on. The nail-bearer nails it down before it can disappear.

People who read Ruskin can almost always remember how and when they caught the bug. When Gandhi was in South Africa around 1910, he had to travel overnight from Johannesburg to Pretoria. A friend gave him Unto this Last as a book to read on the train. Gandhi read it through the night without pausing and when the sun rose in the morning, he says in his autobiography, “I knew what my life would be”. That book, “captured me and made me transform my life”.

It might not have happened; Gandhi might never have read it, or he might have dismissed it as utopian fantasy. Perhaps something else would have made him the Father of his Nation. But chance gave him the book and he nailed its lesson down; he decided to live by it.

What is more, because it seemed so fateful, he remembered the circumstances. It was like an epiphany: a vision of the divine.

Nothing quite so momentous happened to me. The literary critic Tony Tanner, who taught me at Cambridge, advised me to read Ruskin. I read a selection from him with increasing pleasure as I turned the pages.

But I was not “abased” as Ruskin would have said until I got to The Nature of Gothic. A friend was coming round to see me; I had an hour or less to wait for him and decided to fill that time with reading Ruskin’s essay.

Conscious that I was short of time, I had the sensation that time was slowing down – that each second was of immense value, like each word.

I have not looked back.

Clive Wilmer’s 2019 Ruskin Lecture ‘What The Guild of St George Does: Reflections on Life and Wealth’ is published by the Guild, price £6.

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9. Patrick Harding, a new Companion, has been FOR the first time, the Annual Meeting was opened up to the floor, after presentations by Juliette Losq, Sandra Kemp, Louise Pullen, Carolyn Butterworth and Jamie Rust. Any one who wanted to join in was given three minutes to speak their minds about anything that seemed relevant. And with 17 speakers, Simon Seligman made sure they kept to time by dinging a cowbell.

1. Julia Armstrong. A Sheffield journalist who has written much about the Guild, and is a new Companion. “I love the Ruskin Gallery for the mixture of things it displays,” she said.

2. Tony Chisholm spoke about his involvement with the National Arts Education Archive, housed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield: 100 catalogued collections covering 130 years of design and education.

3. Patrick Curry, a writer and another new Companion, championed the idea of “wonder” in modern life, a deep concern of Ruskin, he said.

4. Rachel Dickinson, the new Master, speaking— she said—as a general citizen, gave the example of the 2019 Ruskin in Manchester events as something that could be done when the Guild reached out and cooperated with other cultural bodies such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

5. Peter Day—the editor of The Companion—said that now that the Guild website was so wellestablished, the Directors might decide that a new role and purpose needed to be devised for the magazine.

6. Nick Friend—who runs a cultural organisation called Inscape—called on Companions to remember Bill Mayer, a new American Companion who died 10 days before this AGM, before he was able to sign the Roll.

Nick Friend writes about Bill Mayer on page 9.

7. Sally Goldsmith spoke about the Friends of Edward Carpenter, an organisation seeking to create a memorial to Edward Carpenter in the streets of Sheffield (already designed by the sculptor Maggie Hamlyn). He was a pioneer of LGBT rights who also devised his own design of sandals which are still on sale.

8. Lucy Hadfield is the Chair of the Friends of Ruskin Park in Denmark Hill, South London. She described the events such as poetry workshops and exhibitions they were organising in the park and the Carnegie Library in Lambeth, the first in the country.

Ruskin lived close by at one stage.

lecturing for many years, and put in a plea for more opportunities –for himself. “I love teaching people about nature,” he said. “Please use me.”

10. John Iles told the AGM how he and his wife

Linda came to be accepted as tenants of Uncllys Farm in the Wyre Forest—despite knowing little about Ruskin or farming at the time, 15 years ago. He urged Companions to visit Ruskin Land. “People are coming and getting peace,” he said. See page 46.

11. Brian Luce described his efforts to revive the town of Knottingly, neglected, he said, by Wakefield Council, by creating a new small library: 400 books by the planned December 2nd opening, and then expanding.

12. Dan Marshall of Sheffield Central Library spoke of the thousands who had been attracted to events and exhibitions, working with Ruskin in Sheffield. Many people had been inspired to start drawing. It was great fun, he said.

13. Anna Netri talked about Ruskin’s influence on her work in the community in Sheffield with the Making Masterpieces festival.

14. Ruth Nutter the producer of Ruskin in Sheffield spoke of the way she had been inspired from her first moments in the job by the artist and collector David Walker Barker who died in 2019.

She brandished a piece of agate he gave her: “My touchstone,” she called it. And Ruth paid tribute to “the rich and glorious network” that was the Guild.

15. Kamel Saeed came to Ruskin through Clive Wilmer’s introduction to Unto This Last for which he thanked the retiring Master. “So many people share Ruskin’s ideas without knowing,” he said. Sheffield was a great political city; it would always welcome his ideas.

16. John Ward, a retired GP now volunteering at Brantwood, was delighted to be part of such a terrific collection of people. He had been involved in medical education and told his students that they would think of GP practice as an art as much as a science.

17. Geoffrey Brown, a town planner, urged his listeners to think better of planners than their current low position in public esteem. Planning—he said— could be traced back to the influence of John Ruskin.

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New Companions

doing enough for my community and I hope to find among the companions new friends and sources of inspiration.

COMPANIONS have been joining the Guild at an unprecedented rate in the past year, and there are now more than 300 for the first time.

Some of them have told us who they are and why they became Companions:

Patrick Curry (above) writes:

Marco di Grigorio

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I am a journalist in my 50s and have been working on national networks before launching a local station in Milan. I am still an entrepreneur running a medium sized company and owning interests in others.

I discovered Ruskin through Proust of whom I have been fond since my early youth. My milestone into the Ruskin world is linked to Venice which I consider my second city. Indeed a rather good knowledge of the lagoon is probably the main asset I bring into the community, especially for art and food lovers.

Although I first appreciated the art historian, then the artist, today my attraction to the figure of Ruskin is mainly linked to his beauty activism. I do see him as the champion of a group that puts beauty in the highest place and is willing to fight against the diffusion of injustice.

My first goal is to enhance the recognition of Ruskin in Italy; I am an art collector, I write about art and have connections with art curators. I am involved in several fundraising initiatives and belong to the board of a non profit organisation which has built tens of hospitals and schools in Mali and Burkina Faso; I am sure the work of Ruskin could become a guideline to reflect on the best interventions into a developing context as that of western Africa. I have the feeling I am not

My chief interests are reflected in the books I have written: Defending Middle -Earth, revised edition 2004, Ecological Ethics, rev edn 2017, Defending the Humanities in a Time of Ecocide, 2017, and Enchantment, 2019. There are significant resonances with Ruskin in all these domains: from Tolkien’s love of the natural world and conservative resistance to modernity – the everincreasing importance of environmentalism and ecologism; the Cinderella-like status of the humanities when we need them, and the urgent need for a sense of wonder, now more than ever. Being a Companion encourages me to further develop and share these ideas, including Ruskin’s place in them. As for how that came about, it was through a chance meeting, as we say in Middle-earth! I’m grateful.

I am Robert Somerville. I live in rural Hertfordshire with my wife Lydia (another Guild Companion) and our daughter. My career has been in architecture: both as a designer and

builder. I run a timber frame business involving local people. I am concerned about the loss of craft skills in my industry, as mechanisation, automation and de-skilling accelerate, and would love to see specific promotion of netcarbon-zero work activities and lifestyles. Ruskin’s ideas give great clues on how to achieve this.

So, I would like greater questioning of the established norms of contemporary design and the carboncreating industries that follow on. In my view and experience, the use of materials from our landscapes, the heritage skills of hand tool use and community access to these skills are essential components of a renewed relationship with our planet.

Nancy R Hillier is an American cabinetmaker based in Indiana. She is the author of A Home of Her Own, English Arts & Crafts Furniture and Making Things Work : Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life.

Nancy says: I lived in England from age 12 to 28 and did a basic City & Guilds training in furniture craft. I later completed a degree in religious studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, then a master’s with a focus on ethics.

In the course of that study I found Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings--and Clive Wilmer, via the introduction. We met this past March, and he encouraged me to apply for Guild companionship.

I must confess that I am so overwhelmed by the awfulness of my country's politics right now that I cannot make a meaningful suggestion for anything new I'd like to see the Guild get involved in.

For my part, I will continue to champion the values Ruskin elaborated in the book I referred to, not only in my daily work as a designer-maker of furniture and cabinetry, but in my speaking, teaching, and writing.

interests. Having recently moved to Herne Hill, close to the sites of Ruskin’s London homes, I’m keen to support the establishment of activities and resources to explain, celebrate and showcase Ruskin's work and thinking in the area.

attending various talks about Ruskin and meeting with local Companions, I was encouraged to apply to become a Companion myself. I look forward to continuing to help with future Ruskin in Sheffield events and to learning much more about Ruskin's life, his philosophy and his continuing impact.

Geoffrey Brown I am a town planner from Nottingham.

Early in the bicentenary year I committed myself to finding out more about this influential Victorian thinker and immerse myself in as many events as I could attend. Now, after three exhibitions, two conferences, a visit to Ruskin Land and several books later I have gone some way in achieving that objective, though I recognise there is still much to learn.

2019 may be a difficult act to follow but it has been a good year for Ruskin novices like me to become more aware of his work and to appreciate just how many other people also share this interest.

Jo Nightingale I am an arts communicator from Manchester, and am currently transferring my knowledge and skills into interpretation work for museums and heritage sites. I also recently graduated from an MA in Gothic culture: from mid-eighteenth-century revivalist architecture and novels to the music, subculture and screen arts of the last 50 years.

My particular passion is ‘sensory Gothic’, including music, art and design, and Ruskin and his influence are increasingly central to my

I am Dr Angie Negrine. I have lived in Sheffield for the past 10 years after moving from Leicester where I lived for most of my life. I left school at 16, trained at secretarial college and then worked as a legal secretary. I then spent several years at home bringing up my family. After an Access to Higher Education course, I studied for a degree in Information and Library Studies at Loughborough University.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and I achieved so much more than I had thought I was capable of, which I probably wouldn't have if I'd gone to university straight after school. I then worked in a variety of information and library posts before going to study for an MA in Victorian Studies at Leicester University.

During that course I first learnt about John Ruskin - mainly in his role as an art critic. After completing my MA I was fortunate to receive funding to undertake a doctorate, and my focus moved away from 19th century literature and culture into social, local and medical history and I carried out research into the practice of Poor Law medicine at the Leicester Union workhouse.

I was then drawn back to discovering more about John Ruskin when I became involved in helping with some research into archived correspondence relating to the Ruskin Museum during the time it was housed at Meersbrook Hall in Sheffield. This led me on to volunteer as a host at the Ruskin Museum in Sheffield Makeover event at Meersbrook Hall in October 2018.

Through taking part in that and

Dr Patrick Harding I have lived in Sheffield for 40 years. I am a freelance lecturer for Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield Universities; broadcaster and author of eight books (on flowers, trees, fungi and Christmas).

Working with my artist wife Jean Binney, we delivered a lecture in Sheffield as part of the Ruskin Bicentenary celebrations. This was entitled Art and Education through Nature: Ruskin's legacy in Sheffield.

My teaching tries to mix science with history, folklore, literature and the arts - hence my interest in Ruskin.

I hope to become involved with the Guild's activities in by sharing nature with the public. I always include humour in my teaching; education does not have to be boring.

Peter Day worked for 43 years for BBC Radio News, reporting mostly on business. He is now the editor of The Companion.

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RUSKIN IN SHEFFIELD RUSKIN REVITALISED OVER the last few years writes Ruth Nutter, Louise Pullen and I have worked together to display some of the artworks made by participants of Ruskin in Sheffield projects temporarily in the Ruskin Collection.

One of the most memorable displays was a series of metal creatures made by local residents for Park Centre Community Garden, working with Guild Companion Jason Thomson.

When the fox, parrot, frog and kingfisher left the gallery, the Visitor Assistants reported that they were sorely missed!

In the most recent display, opened in September 2019, Louise wanted to focus on the first two homes of the Ruskin Collection in Sheffield: Walkley and Meersbrook. This is the first time a redisplay of the Collection has been given its own name: Heritage and Legacy of the Ruskin Collection. It seemed a timely moment to remind visitors of the Collection’s origins and impact in these two local communities, and highlight local interest revived through the Ruskin in Sheffield project.

Thanks to initiatives funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Guild Companions have been able to research and share findings about the Ruskin Collection at Walkley and Meersbrook, which have underpinned Ruskin in Sheffield’s programme of pop-up events, performances, outdoor film projections and neighbourhoodwide Big Draw Festivals.

It must come as a surprise to visitors of the current display to be faced with minerals, sculptures and drawings that were displayed in St George’s Museum in Walkley, alongside a baker’s bread tin used for baking Mr Ruskin’s Brown Bread, and a jar of Ruskin Rivelin honey, both inspired by the 2015 Pop-Up Ruskin Museum in Walkley.

In another display, JMW Turner’s watercolour, View of Sheffield from Derbyshire Lane, nestles amongst drawings and paintings by local school children in response to the history of the Ruskin Museum at Meersbrook Hall. A painting by the architecture student Yun Zhou captures a moment of community celebration at Meersbrook Hall in 2018 when the 40

Ruskin Museum Makeover week was launched in a blaze of film projections, lighting up the façade of the Hall and the faces of hundreds of local attenders.

Optimism, creativity and community are the central flavours of the Ruskin in Sheffield exhibits. Many of the artworks are just snaphots of moments of Ruskinian connections which grow and flourish. Teenage participants from our Walkley street mural and sculpture project continue to join in our projects. Artists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists and community volunteers go on to become Guild Companions. Organisations like Heeley Trust (at Meersbrook) and Walkley Carnegie Library become trusted, long term partners and the active bearers of Ruskin’s heritage and legacy today.

Perhaps the most potent Ruskin in Sheffield exhibit is a fabric banner which bears the image of Ruskin’s maxim “There is no wealth but life”, graffiti on the side of a building in Walkley by Extinction Rebellion. It sums up perfectly how sustained engagement in one community can lead to the revival and re-adoption of Ruskin’s ideas for pressing local and global concerns today.

Ruth Nutter was the Producer of Ruskin in Sheffield.

SOMETHING FANTASTIC Malaika Cunningham writes: WHEN Extinction Rebellion activists in London were transforming Waterloo Bridge into a garden in April 2019, I went to see Clive Wilmer, then current Master of the Guild. I have been working with the Guild for a number of years as part of Ruskin in Sheffield; I wanted to talk to Clive about a festival we were organising as part of the Bicentenary celebrations.

My talk with Clive began, predictably, with John Ruskin: his visions for the future and his political beliefs. But most of the conversation was not about utopian projects of the past, it was about the future. Each thread of our conversation ended up in the here and now: how we live well

today and into the future. We briefly questioned the contemporary relevance of a Victorian man. But the answer was obvious: the motivations of the activists on Waterloo Bridge and the chants of the school climate strikers were the same as Ruskin’s.

It is no coincidence that “There is no wealth but life” was recently stencilled across a huge billboard in Walkley, just next door to where Ruskin’s Museum once stood. Perhaps the fundamental difference between Ruskin’s time and now is this: urgency. But in our urgency, we must remember and acknowledge that we are not the first to argue for these things. We stand on solid shoulders.

This was the inspiration for A Future Fantastic festival which took place in Sheffield in July. For the festival, we curated a series of events, each designed to start conversations based on the ideas of Ruskin and focussed on the future: of work, the environment, food production, and the economy.

Taking our cue from Ruskin himself, we mixed together talks, performance, installations and practical workshops, often within the same event. This acknowledged that reflection, conversation and exchange have many different starting points. Many Companions got involved, including the playwright and activist Sarah Woods and one of our youngest Companions Eliza Gilbert, as well as Clive Wilmer.

When, four months after the festival, London was again occupied by Extinction Rebellion the vision of what change is needed felt clearer— for me, and I hope for those who joined us at the Future Fantastic festival. The future we are aiming for is now in slightly sharper focus.

A Future Fantastic festival was curated by Malaika Cunningham (The Bare Project) and Ruth Nutter (Ruskin in Sheffield). It was supported by The Guild of Saint George, JG Graves Charitable Trust, Theatre Deli Sheffield and The Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity.

The People’s Palace of Possibility continues to tour.

Malaika Cunningham is the Artistic Director of The Bare Project. She was a co-founder of the Sheffield Creative Guild.

She is studying for a PhD at the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Leeds.

ON THEIR METAL IT WAS a sort of menagerie, a zoo of metallic animals which appeared in Park Centre Community Garden in 2018. The animals were created by local volunteers, and it was a Ruskininspired idea.

Park Centre Community Garden was already beginning to flourish with tomatoes and pumpkins in what was formerly a redundant patch of land close to a disused swimming pool to the east of Sheffield, when Ruskin in Sheffield came along, working with Diane Cairns, development manager of Manor Castle Development Trust. She and Ruth Nutter had met during a Big Draw Festival in Manor Field Park the previous year.

And in the summer of 2018, in came the Sheffield sculptor and Companion Jason Turpin-Thomson to encourage the volunteer gardeners to branch out into art. There was already evidence of strong artistic flair amongst them in small artworks dotted around the garden. Jason makes sculptures in various sizes and various materials, from small bone figures that fit in the hand to 10ft tall metal creations.

Slightly diffident at first, the 12 Community volunteers soon found the boldness to start turning raw aluminium sheeting into series of animal figures to stand in the Garden.

“There were no expensive tools,” said Jason, “It was a low-tech approach, related to oil drum art. But there was some amazing teamwork.” Four or five different people —men and women— would work together and then pass on what they had done to another team.

All this activity resulted in a parade of animals, among them a fox, a tree frog, a woodpecker, a parakeet, and a very large spider.

The art works went on show in 2019 at the Ruskin Collection at the Millennium Gallery Sheffield in an exhibition featuring Ruskin’s natural history specimens. The community sculptors also had a chance to gain hands-on experience of the Ruskin Collection with a behind-the-scenes expedition to the Gallery. “And these were people who don’t normally go to museums,” said Jason.

He hopes that the Park Centre artists now have new skills they may not have known about before. “They totally surprised themselves,” he said. “One forceful woman volunteer sort of found herself by concentrating on finishing work on the surfaces of the sculptures.”

And the John Ruskin connection?

Jason pointed out the story of Benjamin Creswick, the Sheffield knife-grinder

Garden volunteers and their creations

RUSKIN AT THE LIBRARY

In the Gallery: parrot on parade whose artistic skills were discovered by the curator of Ruskin’s Walkley Museum, and saluted by Ruskin as “a youth of true genius, greatly surprising and delightful to me”. Creswick went on to become a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement and the first modelling master at Birmingham School of Art. As the Park Centre Garden menagerie shows, art can happen in slightly unexpected places.

PD

AS A PUBLIC library we have with many functions, writes Dan Marshall of Sheffield Central Library, not least to encourage people to connect with culture, learning, and the great thinkers of the past. Clearly, the Ruskin Bicentenary Celebrations were a great opportunity to do just that. I was already a Ruskin fan and in my role as audience development lead for the library service I jumped at the chance to get involved.

From the beginning of April until the end of June 2019, Central Library hosted a small exhibition in our foyer and Reading Room. This showcased the work of the Ruskin in Sheffield project and also uncovered some of the beautiful and rarely seen books from our special collections that reflected Ruskin’s interests.

Alongside the exhibition, Ruth Nutter and I also programmed a series of events aimed at all ages. We began with the recreation of two Ruskin lectures. Then we went on to host talks from academics and activists, authors and artists, as well as offering practical sessions for children and adults > 41

> encouraged drawing, writing and even coming together to play board games selected to complement the season’s themes.

During the three month season, several thousand people attended events at the Library and many more viewed the exhibition. I thoroughly enjoyed the session on urban sketching and was inspired to pick up a drawing pad. Chatting to visitors about our rare and beautifully illustrated books was a real pleasure, and watching families create their own gothic structures out of reused cardboard was great fun.

One of our visiting speakers Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper explained that Ruskin’s messages are as relevant today as ever. We live in a time of climate emergency, social injustice and rampant technological change.

I would like to believe that in our own small way, we helped people to connect with Ruskin. In so doing, perhaps we allowed them to view the world with a little more consideration and clarity.

MEERSBROOK MAKEOVER

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IT IS mid-October 2018, writes Helen Parker, and small teams of volunteers from Ruskin in Sheffield and the Friends of Meersbrook Hall take up buckets, cloths and sponges to begin the makeover of a building that for 63 years, between 1890 and 1953, was the Ruskin Museum.

The upper storey has been little used since Sheffield Council staff vacated the premises in 2016, so the windows, walls, doors, radiators all have to be cleaned, Blu-Tac and pins prised from walls and noticeboards, before we can use them for displays.

Around the sweeping staircase, nature pictures by Carfield School pupils appear, garlanded with chains of Virginia creeper from the outside of the Hall. In what was the Library, the lantern and slides used by the curator Gill Parker are installed. In the old Minerals Room, displays tell visitors about the Museum’s grand opening in 1890, complete with a copy of the ceremonial key used on the occasion.

Companion Vanessa Roberts and I dress the Curator’s Room, doing our best to evoke the ambience of an inner sanctum. This space we have dedicated mainly to Genevieve Pilley, the first female curator of the Ruskin Collection.

Replicas of her illuminated art work adorn the walls; a hat and coat hang in the corner and on the Arthur Hayball table in the window lie samples of her correspondence. Vanessa’s illumination

All lit up: celebrations at Meersbrook Hall on vellum and her portraits of Genevieve take pride of place.

It’s Saturday and we’re open to the public. Around the Park, parents and children search for wooden birds hanging in the trees. They bring them in, identify them, draw them and talk with architecture students who are here to help shape visions of the resurrected Hall as a vibrant community space.

A steady stream of curious visitors engages with us as Makeover hosts, wanting to know what the Museum was like; a few older ones share their memories of childhood visits. The evening is cold but outside—warmed by cups of soup—a good crowd looks on enchanted as images are projected fleetingly across the Hall: an ammonite, a study of withered oak leaves, a tropical butterfly. At the same time some of Ruskin’s wise and serious words are broadcast out into the Park.

The Makeover activities go on for six days: a couple come for three days to sit in the Picture Gallery, painstakingly piecing together a jigsaw of John Bunney’s St Marks Basilica. We wondered whether Genevieve had living relatives in the city; to our immense pleasure, great nieces and their descendants visit during the week.

On the penultimate evening, I find myself alone in the upstairs galleries, filled with a sense of communing with the Museum’s past inhabitants. I am satisfied that our celebration has been both a just tribute to Ruskin’s Museum and a glimpse of what the Hall might yet become.

Helen Parker became a volunteer with Ruskin in Sheffield and a Companion of the Guild in 2015. Her booklet “Genevieve Pilley: 50 years’ devotion to Ruskin at the Meersbrook Museum” has just been published by the Guild.

A HERITAGE AND ITS HISTORY THE Ruskin in Sheffield programme has now come to a close, after six fruitful years of pop-up museums, performances, walks, talks and festivals.

It was always intended to be a timelimited programme, culminating in Ruskin’s Bicentenary year in 2019. In that time it has revitalised the heritage and legacy of Ruskin in Sheffield.

Over the next few months, Ruth Nutter will be managing the evaluation of the Ruskin in Sheffield programme so that the Guild can share more widely the value and practice of engaging people with Ruskin in ways that matter today. A book and a short film will capture different aspects of this legacy.

The Guild continues to have a close working relationship with Museums Sheffield. A revitalised steering group has been formed by both organisations to develop ideas and priorities for the care and display of the Ruskin Collection over the next decade.

Ruth will continue to develop the Guild’s partnership with Heeley Trust and other partners in Sheffield. It is hoped that Companions will be involved in exploring further how Ruskin’s ideas can increase wellbeing in communities across Heeley and Meersbrook, from Meersbrook Hall.

Because the programme has ended, Ruth Nutter's role has now changed from Producer of Ruskin in Sheffield to Creative Producer for the Guild, working across the whole organisation.

She will be helping the Guild as it heads towards the 150th anniversary of its founding in 2021.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL Simon Seligman writes: Making Masterpieces offered Sheffield a wonderful day of free drawing and creative activities inspired by the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth and the 500th anniversary of Jacopo Tintoretto.

The project was centred on the creation of a vast street mural next to Exchange Place Studios in Castlegate, for which the artists Grace Foster and Alex Ekins had designed and painted a powerful background in the preceding week. It was a collaboration between the Guild, The Big Draw, Yorkshire Artspace and the Scuola Grande Di San Rocco in Venice.

By the end of the day, around 300 people had been photographed and then pasted the image of themselves up onto the mural, along with stencils, natural history items from the collection and other embellishments.

Others chose to be indoors painting with brushes made of natural materials, or made collages. The very diverse mix of participants were supported by the artists and a number of volunteer Companions. More than 1,000 miles to the south, the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice simultaneously held its first ever public Big Draw event, similarly inspired by the glorious Tintorettos in their care.

During the afternoon in Sheffield, there was a lovely moment when three builders from a neighbouring building site came past, and stopped to take in the mural, talking proudly about their work on an urban regeneration project next door. They were easily persuaded into the studio to be photographed; their delight at seeing themselves up on the mural was infectious, and spoke of the simple power of participation, for adults and children alike. “That’s me on there,” one said as they left.

All through the preceding week, schools had also been participating in the project, so the mural already had masses of smiling young faces all over it, enhanced with shells and creatures from the collection.

The day ended with a movie made

by Companion Steve Pool, with images of the day’s artistic activities in Castlegate and Venice projected onto the back of Exchange Place Studios, alongside images of Tintoretto’s and Ruskin’s work and the two cities. A stirring end to a vivid and far-reaching day.

One overwhelming day

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RUSKIN IN RUSKIN LAND SUNSHINE AND RAIN IN BEWDLEY Geoffrey Brown, a new Companion, reflects on his experiences of the ‘Next Steps with Ruskin’ Study Day: “SUNSHINE is delicious and, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather; only different kinds of good weather.”

So said John Ruskin, his words being displayed at the exhibition Beautiful, Peaceful, Fruitful: Ruskin in Wyre at the Bewdley Museum, one of the many highlights of a very rewarding weekend that I spent in Bewdley in March 2019. There was no snow, but the heavy rain of previous days had led to concern about rising levels of the River Severn and the Environment Agency was sufficiently concerned to erect flood protection barriers. It may not have been an Alpine torrent but I am sure Ruskin would have been impressed with the force of nature.

None of this detracted from my enjoyment of what was my first contact with the Guild of St George. I was previously aware of Ruskin, but knew relatively little about him and even less about the Guild.

The weekend comprised a Study Day at the Baptist Church with a number of presentations on Ruskin’s work, accompanied by workshops. I chose the drawing workshop of the local artist Hilary Baker, who encouraged us, in true Ruskinian style, to really use our eyes to look carefully at an object before we put pencil to paper, as well as recommending the best type of rubber eraser for us to use to amend our well intentioned efforts!

Later in the day we were generously welcomed to a private viewing of the Ruskin in Wyre exhibition at the Bewdley Museum, and then on the Sunday we visited Ruskin Land, wisely following sound advice to wear our wellies or walking boots.

What did I learn ? A little more about Ruskin (it was enough to whet my appetite to find out more and to apply to become a Companion myself); a few new words to add to my vocabulary, my favourite being “illth”, which I do encounter quite a 44

lot; the good work that is being undertaken in sustainable forestry at Ruskin Land; and the enthusiasm of other Guild members I had the opportunity to chat with, including Guild Directors such as Rachel Dickinson, Jenny Robbins and John Iles, generously giving up their time to discuss their work and interests.

GREAT OF HEART Mark Frost writes about the honouring of William Buchan Graham: ON a speculative Ruskinian visit to Wellesley College special archives in 2009, I stumbled serendipitously on a series of handwritten sheets detailing the experiences of an obscure worker from the early history of the Guild of St George.

I had then no idea where it would lead. But one of the most recent results of that discovery occurred on a drizzly Sunday in Bewdley in October 2019. I will remember it with fondness for a very long time.

When I first set my eyes on those sheets of Victorian papers I knew nothing of its author, William Buchan Graham, or that he was the very first agricultural labourer who worked the lands that Ruskin had gathered together after 1871 to experiment in alternatives to competitive capitalist economics. Indeed, as a scholar of Ruskin and environment I had little interest at the time in the Guild of St George.

Nonetheless, the power and poignancy of Graham’s words as he detailed his difficult years at Bewdley between 1878 and 1886 captured me.

The sense that I had stumbled upon an important missing piece of the history of the Guild was confirmed by a feverish month of research on my return to the UK. Many further discoveries followed, made in over a dozen archives in the US and at home. It soon became clear that our previous understanding of the Guild’s work across all its early locations had been partial, incomplete, and largely inaccurate.

I was moved by unearthing the struggles of a host of early Companions– John Guy, William Harrison Riley, James Burden, and

Susan Miller prominent amongst them. But the figure with whom I feel the strongest connection is Graham, a Glaswegian working man with a powerful idealistic streak whose immense contributions to the Guild had never been acknowledged.

Writing The Lost Companions (Anthem Press 2014) was part of a process of recuperation of lost voices, hidden lives, and brave endeavours, and an often-painful putting right of some historical wrongs. On that recent rainy October day in the churchyard of St Leonard’s, Bewdley, that process continued.

It has been generously supported by the Guild through the vision and hard graft of Clive Wilmer and John Iles, the support and encouragement of the church, and the beautiful work of the stonemason, Catriona Cartwright:

The memorial stone laid on Graham’s humble grave is the second supported by the Guild. Companions in Sheffield can visit another in Walkley cemetery, to commemorate the Guild Museum’s first curator, Henry Swan.

In the few words I said at Graham’s graveside I wanted not simply to remember his life and work, but to underline that the greatest tribute that can be paid to his pioneering endeavours is to be found in the Guild’s continuing commitment to work in the Wyre Forest in ways that build on, reflect, and adapt Ruskin’s commitment – and Graham’s – to making the world around us “beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful”.

INTO THE WOODS Guild Director Jenny Robbins writes about the new fruitfulness of Ruskin Land: FOR the first settlers on Ruskin Land, it was not enough merely to preach Ruskin’s principles; they must find a way to live them. Edith Hope Scott wrote: “They bought a few acres of the Wyre Forest and made them into a rich and beautiful fruit farm. Where nothing but oaks grew, there was a livelihood for three families. They were inspired by Ruskin but they were the stuff of heroic pioneers.”

In the years preceding the First World War the “Bewdley Settlement” was very much a model community as Ruskin had envisaged it. In 1928 the Guild’s asset was extended by purchasing 100 acres of woodland to ensure that the native oaks were saved from Forestry Commission hands.

In recent years there has been a change in the place, and the early principles have been rekindled. Once this was a hardworking landscape providing charcoal to fuel the industrial revolution; we have been exploring new ways of working in order to be fruitful and sustainable for the future. The changes have quickly become part of the day-to-day administration of the land, but on reflection they are significant. The Wyre Community Land Trust has delivered the work. The woodland has been improved by active management, and improvements have been made to the fabric of the buildings.

The Companion and Guild Director John Iles and his wife Linda have lived on Uncllys Farm in Ruskin Land for more than 15 years. John says: “Linda and I have grown to see just what a wonderful and unique place it is and how privileged we are to live here.

With that has come responsibility as we have again brought the place to life.

“As a nation we have managed to destroy 97% of our traditional wild flower meadows since the 1930s. Wild flower rich meadows provide nectar sources for invertebrates; they in turn become food sources for birds. Our wildlife has severely diminished since the 1940s. In the Wyre the Grazing Project, supported by the Guild and run by the Wyre Community Land Trust, now manages nearly 400 acres of meadows and wood pasture. It is a significant proportion of the meadows of Worcestershire.

“Across the whole of the UK we have lost most of our ancient seminatural woodland and traditional orchards. The Woodland Trust estimates that only 2.4% of our land area is now covered with native trees.

“After a lull of about 90 years, the woodland in Ruskin Land is being thoughtfully managed by thinning to let more light in to the woodland floor, and we see new growth. We are speeding up the process by planting more than 4,000 young trees of native diverse species; they will provide food for woodland birds and—we hope—be resilient to the pests and diseases we may get as a result of the changing climate. We have replanted the orchards at Uncllys and St George's Farms with traditional local varieties of cherry, apple, pears and plums.”

Much of the conservation work is done by volunteers returning week in week out, whatever the weather. They are part of a community improving the landscape in a myriad of ways. People have been healed by this place: “Working in nature is a medicine beyond prescription,”one said Others have found their way into new livelihoods through their experience.

Ruskin Land is not a tourist attraction with a tea shop, but to those who visit and take the time to stop, to be here in the present, in the place, they find an invitation to relax, to observe, to look closely, to listen and

to be creative. We talk about the physical and mental healing power of being out in the landscape, close to trees, directly witnessing the eternal cycles of the seasons; and we know that people who do stay connected to nature tend to be those who take most care of our natural world.

On Ruskin Land, in the heart of the vast Wyre Forest, these cycles are more tangible for being the central purpose of the place. It is a treasure with as much to offer the close observer as the art collection that Ruskin gave Sheffield. It is no coincidence that an awe and fascination with nature lies at the heart of so many of the loveliest things in the Collection, just as nature's art is such a beguiling part of Ruskin Land.

The Ruskin in Wyre project, which has sought to draw all these strands together, reached new audiences and built useful things in the wider community, working in partnership.

With the challenges of climate change, sustainable farming and recognition of the potential benefits of being out in nature, Ruskin Land is poised to be part of a wider national, indeed global, story. The Guild is the custodian of this beautiful, peaceful and fruitful place for generations to come.

Jenny Robbins is a Director of the Guild of St George and of Wyre Community Land Trust.

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SAVING THE MEADOWLANDS Guild Director John Iles writes: THE Guild owns several meadows in its Wyre Forest estate, Ruskin Land.

These are at St George's Farm where the land was gifted to the Guild in the 1870's, and at Uncllys Farm bought by the Guild in 1930. Several are designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). As well as the properties in the Wyre, the Guild also owns a very special meadow at Sheepscombe near Stroud in Gloucestershire, also a SSSI. St George's Meadow is looked after for the Guild by Natural England.

Why are the Guild's meadows important? Worcestershire's archaeologist, the Companion Adam Mindykowski, thinks that some of the meadows at Uncllys Farm date from the 17th century; during that time they have had years of traditional management. In practice this means that each summer the hay has been cut, turned and baled for winter fodder for grazing animals. After the hay cut cattle or sheep continue to graze until the winter when they are moved indoors or taken to other pastures.

It is this continuity of management that has enabled plant communities to build up over the years. The grazing and cutting removes rank grasses and enables the more delicate wild flowers to seed and germinate. In turn the rich mixture of flowers produces nectar; this attracts insects and bees which are then eaten by birds. So the meadows are an invaluable part of this complex food web. Healthy meadows have a springy turf with myriads of small creatures and fungi underground.

Research is showing us the value of meadows for carbon capture and retention.

Over 97% of these traditionally managed meadows have been lost since the 1930s. This is down to a massive change in farming practices whereby the old meadows were ploughed up, fertilised and then reseeded with rye grass. This gives greater yields of grass for cattle but is unsustainable as tons of natural gas are needed to produce the fertiliser and the meadow becomes a mono-culture.

This process is called “improvement”!

The delicate wild flowers cannot compete and die out.

The damage cannot be repaired. The charity Plantlife estimates that only 25,000 acres of lowland meadows remain in the British Isles. In the 46

MEADOW RESTORATION PROJECT STAGE ONE The Uncllys meadow is prepared. All the hay is cut with a mower, then turned at least twice with a hay-bob and rowed up ready to be baled.

The dry hay is then made into bales with the baler and taken to be stored in a barn ready for the winter.

STAGE TWO

The field is prepared to receive green hay from the donor site by scarifying, taking off as much of the remaining grass as possible opening it up to STAGE THREE

have patches of bare earth.

Wyre Forest the Guild-supported Grazing Project run by the Wyre Community Land Trust manages nearly 400 acres..almost 2% of the national total.

What can be done? First, we must stop any more meadows being lost.

Severe staffing cuts mean that the government's own agency Natural England does not have the capacity properly to monitor these SSSI meadows, nor to take action.

Secondly, we can look after those that remain. After taking on Uncllys Farm in 2004, we soon realised that all around the edges of the Wyre Forest were small fields that had escaped the plough and “improvement”. However many of these meadows were abandoned or under-grazed. Linda and I increased the size of the herd of

Dexter cattle to take on the grazing; we formed the Wyre Community Land Trust (WCLT) to own and manage the herd. Now nearly 400 acres belonging to 14 different landowners in 22 fields are carefully managed.

We can also enhance our existing meadows. Last summer Sally Pendergast from WCLT organised the collection of green hay from a nearby Worcestershire Wildlife Trust nature reserve, Brown's Close; it was then strewed across two of the Uncllys meadows. Through rolling and trampling the seeds in the green hay are dislodged; it is hoped that they will germinate in the spring, giving us more diversity.

John and Linda Iles are the Guild's tenants at Uncllys Farm in Ruskin Land.

STAGE FOUR The

green hay is cut on the donor meadow, rolled up into big round bales and taken to the Uncllys meadow.

HEARTS OF OAK Kate Darby writes about the Studio in the Woods project:

The round bales of green hay are unrolled and spread across the field by a wonderful team of volunteers on STAGE FIVE

the hottest day of the year.

STAGE SIX A roller is used to push the seeds

out of the green hay and into the field. Later on cattle will come onto the field ; they trample the hay and eat off the surplus green hay.

RESULT (still to

come) A better meadow!

IN 2006 a friend and fellow architect, Piers Taylor, asked me if I wanted to join him and a few others to help run a design and make workshop in a woodland outside Bath. Some kind of alchemy happened that weekend.

Whether it was the power of building as a community (the Amish barn-raising experience) or discovering that you can create something unexpected and interesting in a very short space of time or simply the pleasure of working all day in a forest, we were hooked. Studio in the Woods was born.

Since then the four day event has taken place in many different woodlands and in 2018 and 2019 we had the good fortune of being hosted by the Guild of St George and the Wyre Community Land Trust on Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest.

Typically we will comprise about 10 group leaders and 50 participants who are drawn by their common desire to make something together in a beautiful place.

In the past we have attracted students, architects, graphic designers, timber merchants, joiners, writers, property developers, even a health and safety inspector. Invited speakers give talks in the evening and prestigious architects visit on the last day to reflect on what we have been up to.

One of the distinguished supporters of Studio in the Woods was the visionary and influential architect Ted Cullinan, who died in November 2019 at the age of 88. He was involved with the scheme from the very beginning and attended the first of the two SITW in the Wyre.

As Studio in the Woods has evolved so has our sensitivity to the place in which we are located. We have discovered that using material from our host woodland makes both a connection to the place and adds a richness to the structures that are created.

On Ruskin Land we have been able to use oak for the first time: an incredible material steeped in history and with a strength-to-weight ratio better than steel. With 80% of the harvested 100 year old trees being used for fire wood we saw SITW as an opportunity to re-use this material to make something much more valuable.

We tasked the participants to use > 47

> the least valuable trees and to use the constraints that this offered as an opportunity. The pictures show some of the results.

A group led by Piers, Meredith, Zoe and Carolyn asked for the most curved (and therefore ‘least valuable’) lengths of timber to be milled into beautiful 50mm thick curved planks. These they then stacked around a tree using its trunk as the support for the winch used to haul each heavy piece of timber into position. The result is a tree reorganized. Shin, Zoe’s group used branches from the crown of the

trees that are discarded on the forest floor when a tree is felled. They carefully wove each branch into a “nest” capable of holding all 60 participants of the 2018 SITW. Je, Lee, Tim and Lynton made a truss capable of spanning 18 meters entirely out of short lengths of knot free oak that can be extracted from “firewood” grade timber. Gianni and I used SITW 2018 to explore possibilities for future building at St George’s farm by measuring the shadows cast by the buildings and exploring how a reciprocal structure

might “grow” in any direction to capture the sunlight.

An abiding memory is of birdsong mingling with the gentle tap tap tapping of small steel hammers on oak as Martin, Charley and Oscar’s group perfected their ingenious “cats paw” detail to connect together laths of timber. The event was beautiful, peaceful and fruitful. I think Ruskin would have approved.

Kate Darby also runs a masters design studio at Cardiff University and is the principal of Kate Darby Architects.

WONDERS IN WOOD

Studio in the Woods in the Wyre Forest photographed by Jim Stephenson

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Studio in the Woods in the Wyre Forest photographed by Jim Stephenson 49

RUSKIN IN NORTH AMERICA RUSKIN AT HARVARD FOR decades, Companion R. Dyke Benjamin has been collecting Ruskin rarities, ranging from unpublished letters, scarce first editions of Ruskin’s books, to some of his paintings. During that time, Dyke’s collection evolved into the most important cache of Ruskiniana in North America.

He is a graduate of Harvard University’s Business School, and in 2018 Dyke asked Houghton Library at Harvard if it would like to preserve his treasures in perpetuity. It is of course a famous repository of rare literary objects.

world and the threats posed to it by industrialism, as well as his views on the role and meaning of work and the practice and value of art and architecture in social life. In keeping with this, the subject of Sara’s lecture was “The Things that Lead to Life”: Ruskin the Educator. She considered how Ruskin’s educational ideals related to each theme, emphasising what we can learn from them today.

When the exhibition closed in April, there was another event when Dyke was thanked profusely for his gift by Peter Accardo and then delivered his own lecture to a packed audience, No Idle Dreamer: John Ruskin’s Universal Vision of the Ideal. A lovely reception followed.

The exhibition catalogue was edited

by Peter Accardo; it includes essays by the Harvard Professor of Business Nein -he Hsieh, Companions Michael Wheeler and Jim Spates, and--naturally -- Dyke Benjamin. The subtitle of his essay The Story of a Collector’s Interest in Becoming a Life Guide and a Force for the Public Good pointed directly to his generosity and life-long commitment to Ruskin.

JIM SPATES

RUSKIN IN LOS ANGELES

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Houghton accepted with delight, and held a series of events to celebrate the acquisition. Foremost among these was an exhibition at Houghton mainly of items from Dyke’s reserve: Victorian Visionary: John Ruskin and the Realization of the Ideal. One of the rarest of his rarities on show was a copy of the page-proof version of Ruskin’s Queen of the Air with the author’s handwritten corrections made just before the book went to press.

On a snowy day in February just after Ruskin’s birthday, Sara Atwood delivered the inaugural lecture for the Benjamin exhibition. The display had been curated with insight and creativity

by Peter X. Accardo, Houghton’s Programs and Public Service Librarian.

It was designed to highlight connections between the objects and Ruskin’s thinking about the natural

THROUGHOUT the Bicentenary Year, The Ruskin Art Club of Los Angeles hosted events celebrating Ruskin and his continuing importance in the modern world.

Celebrations began with a concert in February at the Hancock Museum on the University of Southern California Campus. This featured the West coast premiere of Sarah Rodgers’ chamber piece for tenor and string quartet The King of the Golden River, based on Ruskin’s children’s story. The idea for the event was suggested by Robert Hewison, who mounted a similar event in London. The Felix Quartet at The Thornton School were joined by the tenor Drake Dantzler from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

(The same musicians performed the work at the Huntington Library Ruskin Conference in December.)

Dr. Amy Woodson-Boulton from the History Department at Loyola

Marymount University introduced the Ruskin Art Club event and the RAC member Anne Petach offered personal reflections on Ruskin’s evergreen tale.

The Hancock Memorial Museum provided a classic, if slightly quirky, early Los Angeles atmosphere. Four public rooms from the original 1909 Hancock Mansion were moved from mid-city to the USC campus in the 1930s to create the museum, and it is complete with marble staircases, stained glass, decorative organ pipes, a Chinoiserie dining room and a gloomy library with fireplace and stern portraits of the oil-rich Hancocks. The room where the concert was held once hosted perfomers such as Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky.

The 20th Annual Ruskin Lecture was held at the Doheny Memorial Library at USC in March when Robert Hewison spoke on The Argument of the Eye: Ruskin’s Visual Experiences and their Effect on his Aesthetics.

In April, Gabriel Meyer led The Ruskin Circle and a distinguished audience of artists, docents, and museum professionals at Denenberg Fine Arts in West Hollywood in a wide -ranging discussion of Ruskin in America, exploring his influence on artists, educators, and art movements in 19th century America.

In May, a group toured the newly restored William Andrews Clark Library. A 1926 architectural gem, the library boasts the world’s largest collection of Oscar Wilde manuscripts and ephemera together with priceless collections of 17th and 18th century works and fine press editions. We saw some of the Library’s holdings of the work of Eric Gill, the Arts and Crafts printer and a follower of William Morris, along with several notable samples of the Library’s Kelmscott Press collection, including a copy of Morris’s famous edition of Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic.

In the autumn of 2019 the Ruskin Art Club co-hosted a lecture by Jim Spates entitled A New and Natural Beauty: John Ruskin and the Birth of the Arts and Crafts Movement with The Friends of the Gamble House in Pasadena. The Gamble House, a National Historic Landmark, was the creation of the architects Henry and Charles Greene; it is one of the most famous (and beautiful) living spaces in North America. Jim explained the role that Ruskin’s writings had played in laying

the groundwork for the Arts and Crafts idea generally, an idea which was first spearheaded in the UK by Morris, and then spread to North America. It was enthusiastically adopted by individuals and groups committed to working with their hands, social reform, and the revival of the crafts.

GABRIEL MEYER

Gabriel Meyer is Executive Director of the Ruskin Art Club

RUSKIN AT ROYCROFT THE Roycroft Campus in East Aurora, New York, was founded 125 years ago by Elbert Hubbard, a lifelong admirer of Ruskin and Morris.

So inspired was he by their works that, after visiting both in England in the 1890s, he determined to start a community based on their teachings, and it is still thriving. In the Fall of 2019, a major Ruskin conference was held at the Roycroft Campus, pictured right.

When the average American thinks of the historic Arts and Crafts Movement, it is Craftsman bungalows or Stickley chairs that usually come to mind, at best. But there is a great deal more to this supremely influential nineteenth century movement than furniture, wainscoting, and wallpaper.

The Rycroft conference on John Ruskin and the Beginnings of the Arts and Crafts Movement was co-sponsored by the North American Guild of St. George and the Roycroft Print Shop. It aimed to correct such misapprehensions by focusing on the ideas and vision of life that inspired the movement in the first place.

A conventional view would place the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement with William Morris and the founding of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887. But in fact John Ruskin was the real animating source behind the movement, undergirding Morris’s own efforts with his own impassioned pleas designed to find ways to create timeless beauty in the midst of the injustice and squalor of industrial society. It is a timely reminder for our own highly mechanised era.

The setting was uniquely apt.

Roycroft Campus was once the heart of the Roycroft Community, an influential colony of printers, furniture makers, metal and leather smiths, bookbinders and artists founded in 1895. Nine of the fourteen original Roycroft buildings were awarded

National Landmark Status in 1986.

A Ruskin quote provided Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofter creed and also served as a kind of subtext for the conference: “Working with the head, hand, and heart, and mixing enough play with work so that every task is pleasurable, makes for health and happiness.”

Professor Jim Spates’ key lecture stressed the roots of the arts and crafts impulse in Ruskin’s vision of an integrated aesthetics anchored in meaningful, cooperative, and communal work. Subsequent presentations reflected other facets of Ruskin’s legacy.

The Roycroft Renaissance Artisan in Photography, Peter Potter talked on Photography in the Arts and Crafts Era. He delved into the influence of early daguerreotype photography on Ruskin, examining the remarkable cache of pictures taken by Ruskin and his servants in the middle of the 19th century, images rediscovered in 2006

by Ken and Jenny Jacobson. Peter used examples of his own evocative photography to show how much Ruskin’s thoughts about photography had influenced modern imagemaking.

Paul Dawson, Chair of The Friends of Ruskin’s Brantwood and editor of that organisation’s newsletter, described the enduring relationship between Ruskin and his publisher, George Allen, in a talk called John Ruskin, George Allen, William Morris, and the Private Press Movement. A skilled joiner and furniture maker, Allen was one of Ruskin’s students at the London Working Men’s College in

the 1850s, and mastered engraving under his tutelage.

In 1871, Ruskin decided to set up his own publishing house and entrusted the enterprise to the ever-loyal and versatile Allen. In that role, first publishing Ruskin’s works almost exclusively, Allen became quite successful; his output included the 39volume Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, issued between 1903 and 1912. Paul also reflected on Ruskin and Morris’s notions about book production, and their influence in creating the private press movement.

This was a signal inspiration for Roycroft’s own publishing enterprise in the early 20th century.

The conference was brought up-todate and down-to-earth by Kay Walter’s lively presentation about her work teaching Ruskin to students in rural Arkansas. A professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, she described how she has integrated Ruskinian principles into the regular course work of her students; they often come from underserved communities.

And she reports remarkable, lifechanging results. Her presentation demonstrated ways to effectively communicate Ruskin’s ideas to contemporary young people, and also proved effective testimony to Ruskin’s humanist philosophy of education and its insistence on empowering the human capacities for wonder, insight, and empathy.

Finally the Print Master Joe Weber led the group on a hands-on tour of the Roycroft Print Shop. In effect, it is a replication of Elbert Hubbard’s > 51

In Bewdley, the travellers were welcomed to Uncllys Farm by John and Linda Isles, an idyllic rural visit that included Linda’s delicious home-cooked lunch. Then on to Lancaster. Sandra Kemp took the group round the Ruskin Library, where they looked at Ruskin drawings and letters. Spurred by the letters, the conversation turned to Ruskin’s views on women.

After Lancaster came the Lake District: Friar’s Crag, Keswick; Wordsworth’s home Dove Cottage in Grasmere; and Coniston, where the group stayed put for three days.

But the excursions continued: to Ruskin’s grave at St Andrew’s Church Coniston; the Ruskin Museum, and a trip in the 19th century steam yacht The Gondola across Coniston Water to Ruskin’s home for 30 years, Brantwood, where the pilgrims were greeted by Joe Weber in the Roycroft print shop > original print shop 1895-1914. It includes a number of Hubbard’s original (and still functioning) printing presses which Joe has bought at a number of sales. He also showed a number of his own books, all of which had been printed on these early machines, these including Ruskin and Morris essays, and works of his own on the history of the small press movement.

GABRIEL MEYER

WONDERFUL WHIRLWIND

including Millais’s picture of Ruskin’s wife Effie in Scotland in 1853.

The next day, the group visited Christ Church (Morris and BurneJones stained glass windows) and the University Museum of Natural History; Ruskin played a significant role in its design.

Then on to Birmingham and the Museum and Art Gallery’s collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, plus the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in Birmingham Cathedral. The day ended with a talk by Jim Spates on Of King’s Treasuries, Ruskin on the importance of reading great books.

Howard Hull. After viewing a special exhibition of some of Turner’s Venice paintings, Professor Spates and Howard Hull led the dedication of the Akin Burd Library. The Ruskin books of the late Professor Van Akin Burd, a Companion and leading Ruskin scholar, have been given to Brantwood by his

The 2019 American Ruskin tour in England IN May 2019, Companions Jim Spates and Nick Friend led a tour of keen Ruskin enthusiasts from North America to various places in England associated with him: a hectic eight days.

The group included representatives from the Arts & Crafts Colony of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, the Roycroft Community in Western New York, The Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, and The Hillside Club in Berkeley, California.

On arrival at Heathrow, the group was already saturated with the Ruskin homework assigned by Professor Spates. Then off to Oxford, and a lecture by Robert Hewison on Ruskin’s Oxford years as a student and professor. At the Ashmolean Museum, the group was shown many Ruskin drawings, and then saw some of the Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings 52

The group with Coniston Old Man in the background: Liz Wesolowski, Jennifer Morris, Jim Spates, Bob Knight, Nick Friend, Beverly Denenberg, Stuart Denenberg, Henry Combrook, Dierdre Watters, Christian Forte, Peter Howell, Ryan Berley, Wendy Ward, Jane McKinne-Mayer, Bill Mayer

daughter Joyce Hicks. He died in 2015 at the age 0f 101; Jim Spates had been a close friend, and gave a heartfelt speech. On the second day, a return visit to the Brantwood gardens and a Japanese tea ceremony.

Then the group headed for Sheffield via Kirkby Lonsdale and its church painted by Turner. In Sheffield, the travellers lunched and dined with the Master Clive Wilmer, saw the Ruskin Gallery with Louise Pullen and visited Walkley with Clive and Ruth Nutter.

At Gerry’s Bakery they ate the

sourdough bread made to a recipe which Jim Spates had discovered in a volume of Ruskin’s letters at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The last stop of the tour was Manchester, for the John Rylands Library and The Whitworth art gallery. At the Library the group saw first editions and manuscripts inscribed

by Ruskin, and private press volumes from the famous presses of Kelmscott, Essex House and Doves.

The Whitworth exhibition was A Joy Forever: How to Use Art to Change the World and its Price in the Market, of works by Ruskin himself and artists who over the past 150 years have reflected his complex legacy. The final evening ended with an impassioned lecture by Jim Spates on Ruskin’s great lecture, Traffic, provoking lively discussion.

Ryan Berley says The trip was a wonderful whirlwind, full of art, life, and Ruskin. Jim Spates passionately taught and read to us about Ruskin’s life and work throughout the journey, and Nick Friend was an incomparable guide who organized and curated more cultural stops in a week than most tourists experience in a month, with the finesse of a fine artist.

No fewer than five of those who had been on the tour immediately applied to become Companions of The Guild; four others were already Companions.

Ryan Berley’s full-length report on the Tour is available on the Guild website.

RUSKIN IN FRANCE THE small town of Pau nestling at the foot of the French Pyrenees was the venue for a conference in February 2019 writes Companion Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, who was one of the organisers. It was sponsored by the French Victorian Society SFEVE, which she currently chairs.

The meeting provided a Bicentenary opportunity to reflect on the modernday reception of Ruskin’s writings in France and on the multifarious interpretations elicited by his abiding vision.

The conference was called Mediating Ruskin: Through a Kaleidoscope, Brightly, and it was held at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour. Participants were able to discover Ruskin’s writings by attending seminars led by Companions Rachel Dickinson and George Landow; they also mounted a small Ruskin exhibition in the University library.

Pau turned out to be a great venue for the conference as it attracted a significant number of international speakers who happily bonded with their French counterparts. The conference participants were delighted to hear excellent papers by several of our most distinguished Companions who had come from all over the world, including Japan (Chiaki Yokohama) and the USA (Sara Atwood).

The keynote speaker Professor George Landow also gave a relaxed and much appreciated talk on Ruskin, Credibility and Power. The first day ended with an open lecture on Proust and Ruskin given by Jérôme Bastianelli; he is current curator of the

Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and chair of the Société des Amis de Proust. His didactic approach and amazing knowledge of Ruskin’s writings clearly impressed the conference delegates as much as the larger greyhaired audience who had come to attend the lecture.

Recognised Ruskin scholars easily socialised with newcomers to Ruskin, so that the sense of a community was strongly felt.

Day two opened at the historic Château de Pau – a venue that fitted the themes covered by the speakers.

We heard an excellent talk on Ruskin’s Flora of Chamouni given by Companion Stephen Wildman and several papers by promising young scholars. Further exploring the Ruskin-Proust connection, keynote speaker Professor Emily Eells masterfully demonstrated how Proust had recast Ruskin’s texts and used them “as an optical instrument offering an informed, illuminating view of the world”.

Rachel Dickinson concluded the conference with a paper that also tied in well with the optical focus of the event; she demonstrated how Ruskin’s reliance on hagiography had shaped his outlook on life.

As everybody knows, Ruskin never went to the Pyrenees other than through translation. But at the end of those rich and eventful days, one had the sense that Ruskin’s ideas had indeed reached out so far and resonated loud and clear in many minds and hearts.

The Pyrenees in the background: Conference participants and TOP the Chateau 53

BOOK REVIEWS PICTURE PERFECT

The King of the Golden River

by John Ruskin illustrated by Sir Quentin Blake.

Thames and Hudson £14.95

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BETWEEN September 2nd and October 21st in 1841 John Ruskin was staying at Leamington Spa under Dr. Henry Jephson, whose routine included many glasses of water, a slender diet and regular hours. Aged 22, Ruskin had already written many articles on scientific subjects. He was a published poet and had won the Newdigate Poetry Prize at Oxford. He was also the author of The Poetry of Architecture.

The serious Ruskin had been challenged by a 12-year-old friend to write a fairy story. To help pass the time at Leamington Spa, he wrote The King of the Golden River. It was a book destined to go through far more editions and translations than any of his far more serious and important publications.

Ruskin’s friend and biographer WG Collingwood records that the story was written in two sittings. This is borne out by an examination of the original manuscript, now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. It is now ironed and flattened and bound, but if you know what you are looking for, you can detect that part of the manuscript has been folded once, and the other part twice, to fit two separate envelopes when the story was sent home for his father to read.

The story was eventually published 10 years later by Smith Elder, just too late to catch the Christmas market.

Happily this beautiful new edition was published in good time to join the celebrations of Ruskin’s bicentenary.

It is a finely bound large format book, with a type size very suitable for both

the younger reader and for older ones with failing eyesight. And there is also plenty of space for Sir Quentin’s Blake’s beautiful illustrations.

Sir Quentin is a Companion of the Guild of St George, and a long-time supporter of the Guild’s Campaign for Drawing. He is one of Britain’s leading illustrators and a fine and generous artist with 300 books to his credit, many of them notable children’s books.

In 1999 he was appointed as the first Children’s Laureate. Some years ago he very kindly gave the Guild collection several of the original illustrations made in connection with the Campaign for Drawing.

This new book has 36 marvellous colour illustrations reproduced, with a number spread over double pages. The story—as many readers will know—is of goodness and kindness triumphing over greed and unkindness. By the time it was eventually published in 1851, Ruskin had married his by then 22-year -old challenger. Since then the book has gone through hundreds of different editions and must have been read by many thousands of children, and not a few adults.

So if you are looking for a gift for a small friend or wish to add something special to your own library, I can wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful new edition with Quentin Blake’s splendid illustrations.

JAMES S DEARDEN

James Dearden is a former Master who has been a Companion since 1979. He has written widely on Ruskin.

BY TORCHLIGHT

A Torch at Midnight: A Study of John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture by Robert Brownell.

Pallas Athene £19.99.

THOSE of us who study and admire Ruskin have long believed that his ideas have a place in today’s debates about education, labour, environment, the economy, art, craft, and culture. Last year’s celebration of Ruskin has enabled us to reach a wider audience amongst

the general public and to make the case that Ruskin’s ideas might productively inform discussions about some of our most pressing problems.

Robert Brownell’s book is part of this effort to make Ruskin more accessible to modern readers. Brownell observes that the “rehabilitation of Ruskin is seriously prejudiced by the difficulty modern readers have in understanding what exactly Ruskin wrote”. Modern culture, he writes, values “ease of access, simplicity and transparency”, whereas Ruskin’s allusive, multi-layered books demand thoughtful, active engagement.

A Torch at Midnight is an insightful and detailed guide to one of Ruskin’s seminal works of art criticism, shaped by the idea that “the great achievement of Ruskin’s major books is to draw attention to the difficulty and the delight to be had in constructing and unravelling the deeper meanings of great historical art and architecture, and understanding the role that beauty plays in interpreting the mystery of our world and the part we play in it”.

Brownell is interested in exploring the philosophical principles that underpin Ruskin’s allegorical writing.

He grounds his close analysis of Seven Lamps in a discussion of the sometimes fraught interaction between art and religion during the period, pointing to the “doctrinal implications” associated with debates about “the multiple meanings of words and the existence of truth in allegorical form”, particularly within the Evangelical faith in which Ruskin was raised (and which he later rejected).

Evangelical attitudes “on architecture, art, and language were directly opposed to Ruskin’s own”. Arguing that Ruskin was “deeply involved..in the traditional debate about the relationship of ‘things’ to their ‘signs’’’, Brownell reveals the ways in which Ruskin responds to and resists the terms of this debate in the intricately-patterned structure of Seven Lamps. Foregrounding the implications of Ruskin’s early Evangelicalism, A Torch at Midnight illuminates Ruskin’s critical methods and aims in Seven Lamps.

The result is not only an excavation of the text itself, but an exploration of Ruskin’s mind as he wrote it, revealing the theological, cultural, and aesthetic issues to which he was responding, often in radical ways.

A Torch at Midnight is a valuable addition to Ruskin studies, engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and well-produced. It is better suited to Ruskin scholars, however, than to the

general reader, for whom Brownell’s argument for Ruskin’s relevance might well be overshadowed by his emphasis on the difficulty of Ruskin’s books (and by the idea that a study like Brownell’s is necessary to understand them). Yet for those already familiar with Ruskin’s work, this is a compelling work of scholarship that will deepen and enrich the reading of Seven Lamps.

SARA ATWOOD Professor Sara Atwood teaches English at Portland State University and Portland Community College in Oregon.

TRAVELLERS

William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road On Which The World Should Travel A collection of essays edited by John Blewitt for The William Morris Society. University of Exeter Press £75hb, £30pb IN 1892 William Morris praised John Ruskin in the introduction to the Kelmscott Press edition of The Nature of Gothic. Morris wrote that The Nature of Gothic was “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century” and that “the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour”.

One of the joys of reading Morris’s political and economic philosophy is that it is the ideas of a practising craftsman and artist. Ruskin called Morris ‘the ablest man of his time’.

The William Morris Society’s collection of articles A New Road On Which The World Should Travel was brought together by the Society member John Blewitt, also of the Schumacher Institute, from the archive of the Society’s Journal of William Morris Studies. The book traces the influence of Ruskin on Morris. Unlike Ruskin who had lacked an oppositional front to join, in the 1880s Morris was at the forefront of the Socialist movement.

Morris’s socialism was concerned not

just with the relations of production but also the nature of work and elements of creativity and joy in labour.

Four of the chapters give a particularly detailed account of Morris’s political philosophy and its foundational debt to Ruskin. Peter Faulkner writes of Morris’s first encounters with Ruskin’s ideas whilst at Oxford in the 1850s and their continuing influence in the creation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in the 1870s. Michael Naslas considers Morris’s Medievalism and how it shaped his ideas of how the future could be. Lawrence Goldman writes of the journey from art to politics in both Ruskin and Morris and how this took a different road for each.

Christopher Shaw evaluates Morris’s conception of the division of labour and traces it through Ruskin back to Schiller. Shaw also analyses the similarities and differences in the critique of the division of labour in Marx and Morris.

Several chapters consider Ruskin’s influence on Morris’s art. Peter Faulkner gives an account of how Morris’s art has a source in Ruskin’s idea of nature. Faulkner describes Morris’s sequence of artistic endeavours and their relation to the Pre-Raphaelite ethos. Jacques Migeon suggests Ruskin had a great influence on Webb and Morris’s design of Red House through his 1854 Lectures on Architecture and Painting. David Faldet compares and contrasts the manufacturing activities of Ruskin’s Laxey Mill and Morris’s Merton Abbey. Evelyn Phimister gives an account of how Morris collected, studied and created illuminated manuscripts throughout his life as a result of reading Ruskin’s appreciation of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

A further four chapters are on Ruskin.

David Elliot writes on Ruskin and Fairfax Murray, and Chris Brooks considers books on Morris and Ruskinian Social Criticism. Robert Brownell wonders whether Ruskin should be considered a patron or a patriarch in regard to women and education and the arts. Sara Atwood has written a piece specially for this volume, on Ruskin, the environment and education. Ruskin’s deep connection and reverence for nature, his idea that to see nature is to see clearly and therefore access true appreciation of art, is posited as important to the furtherance of the good society.

Morris started life as a follower of Ruskin, but by the 1880s Morris had become a revolutionary as he felt Ruskin’s ideals could not be achieved within the constraints of Victorian industrial capitalism. Hence, John

Blewitt completes this collection with an assessment of Ruskin’s sociopolitical worldview from a libertarian socialist perspective. Libertarian socialism characterises Morris’s final view on how to achieve the objectives that Ruskin had originally put forward in The Nature of Gothic.

HUGH HOBBS

Hugh Hobbs contributes to the Magazine of the William Morris Society.

VISIONARY

To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters by Suzanne Fagence Cooper. Quercus £12.99 MANY people will have had their minds opened to the influence of John Ruskin in his bicentenary year, As other pages in this Companion demonstrate, Suzanne Fagence Cooper was part of that mind-opening process with her role as one of the organisers of the exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud in York and Kendal.

But she has also done a signal service by reaching out beyond the closeted art gallery world to write an elegant introduction for those whose interest in Ruskin has been quickened by the publicity accorded to the bicentenary.

Her book To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters is wonderfully unintimidating.

It fits neatly in the hand, is attractively designed, and has a striking, imperative title. Amid the weighty tomes devoted to Ruskin, this is a positively alluring book.

Telling the story of her own engagement with Ruskin, Suzanne Cooper straight away explains how and why clearly, urgently, Ruskin speaks to us. “He made it possible for me to say,” she writes, “as William Morris said, that I wanted to ‘devote my life to art’.”

This is a compelling discovery on what is only page 4, in the preface. >

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> This book about seeing clearly carefully and vividly lays out the practical lessons that contemporary readers can absorb from Ruskin’s life and work, set out in the chapter headings: Seeing, Drawing, Building, Travelling, Learning etc. Chapter by chapter—indeed, paragraph heading by paragraph heading—we discover how the ups and downs of Ruskin’s own life helped him to develop the ideas which are still so relevant long after he first realised them.

And she blows off some of the Ruskin cobwebs—those Latin titles for books aimed at the general public, for example. There are striking remarks: Ruskin was saved, says Suzanne Cooper, by faith and drawing. But sometime—for him—the world seems to be too big to be taken in at glance.

Deftly she tucks her own experience of encountering Ruskin in to what is a wonderfully accessible little book. In the chapter on Working there is a lively description of her own journey to Bewdley, head buzzing with Ruskin quotations, entwined with sharp glimpses of the modern English landscape. When she gets to Ruskin Land, it is Ruskin in action, a sense of fulfilment.

Suzanne Fagence Cooper played a signal part in the bicentenary year. The Storm Cloud was a potent art exhibition, but exhibitions fade in the memory. To See Clearly will linger, on the bookshelves and in the mind. She helps us see why Ruskin is still our contemporary.

PETER DAY

Peter Day is the editor of The Companion

REVIVALIST

The Ruskin Revival 1969-2019

by Suzanne Fagence Cooper.

Pallas Athene, 2019

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AS well as co-editing the book of essays that accompanied the exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Storm-Cloud, Suzanne Fagence Cooper wrote To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters , and after

it this book The Ruskin Revival 19692019 from the most Ruskin-friendly of publishers, Pallas Athene. Neither author nor publisher should apologise for the obvious fact that The Ruskin Revival has been a rush job. Fagence Cooper began writing in January 2019 and the book was in print by the end of September. She has had not only to write very fast but to learn very fast.

She clearly knows her Ruskin well, but the book is only indirectly about Ruskin himself. Its subject is Ruskin’s legacy in the world today and, over a period of fifty years, the recovery of his reputation.

There are no precedents for writing on these matters and I hope it is not unkind to say that the opportunity for more research would have resulted in a more accurate and more balanced account. I very much hope for a revised edition – partly because what she has done is already so valuable.

As is well-known, Ruskin’s reputation fell into a trough at (roughly speaking) the end of the First World War and sank to its lowest depth just after the Second. It began to show signs of recovery, first in the USA, then in Britain, during the 1960s. Fagence Cooper begins in 1969 with the first evidence that something was stirring: the strikingly international Brantwood conference.

This was convened by James Dearden. From there, a steady upward curve reached its first climax with the return to Sheffield in 1985 of what is now the Ruskin Collection. This more broadly indicated a recovery for the Guild of St George under the Mastership of Anthony Harris.

A steeper curve then led to the creation of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University and, not long afterwards, the move of the Whitehouse Collection from the Isle of Wight, where J.H. Whitehouse had established it, to Lancaster in 1993 – within reach of the Lake District and Ruskin’s home at Coniston. Richard MacCormac’s beautiful Ruskin Library opened at Lancaster in 2000.

It provided the launch pad for the events marking the Centenary of Ruskin’s death and the Tate exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites curated by Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman. “This is going to be a blockbuster!” Hewison told the Ruskin To-Day group when they first met five years before to plan and co-ordinate the Centenary – and so indeed it was. Ruskin To-Day, incidentally, was as crucial to 2019 as it was to 2000. From the Centenary in 2000 to the Bicentenary in 2019, the curve has been at its steepest. Even at the time of the Tate show, in which

Ruskin was buttressed by Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, no one could have predicted that an exhibition like the Guild’s John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing would attract 57,000 visitors to a small London gallery in less than three months. Or that the online magazine BBC Culture would ask in a headline: “Was Ruskin the most important man of the last 200 hundred years?”

In that context it is not quite so surprising, as we learn towards the end of the book, that Lancaster University, supported by the Guild and other Ruskinian bodies, decided to purchase the Whitehouse Collection for the nation and thereby ensure the future of Brantwood.

If Fagence Cooper does revise her book, she may wish to add to her account of the year’s events some reflections on the responses they elicited from all conditions of people, from many reviews and articles and from over a dozen new books.

As it is, the feeling she communicates of an epic progress towards the higher ground is compelling – the feeling that Ruskin is going places and reaching people who wouldn’t have expected a Victorian sage to have much to say to them.

Towards the end of the book she quotes a passage from one of his less well-known lectures. He is talking about the cities of the future and what he fears they will be like: “Cities built in black air ..cities in which the object of men is not life, but labour; and in which all chief magnitude of edifice is to enclose machinery; cities in which the streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a happy people, but the drains for a discharge of a tormented mob, in which the only object of reaching any spot is to be transferred to another; in which existence becomes mere transition, and every creature is only one atom in a drift of human dust.”

There was a time when writing of that sort would have been dismissed as hysterical. No more. The visionary truth of it strikes instantly home. It is to Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s credit that she can see how the endeavours of the Ruskin Society, the Guild of St George, the Big Draw, the Friends of Brantwood, the Ruskin Museum at Coniston, Ruskin To-Day and what is now called simply “The Ruskin” at Lancaster are all of them fuelled by prophetic insight of this imaginative depth and energy.

CLIVE WILMER

Clive Wilmer was Master of the Guild from 2009 to 2019.

CLEVER DICTIONARY John Ruskin An Idiosyncratic Dictionary by Michael Glover. Lund Humphries £17.50 THE poet and arts journalist Michael Glover clearly had a great time writing this guide to Ruskin, "encompassing his passions, his delusions and his prophecies" as the cover declares. It's a fascinating read, a pick and mix of better and lesserknown facts and stories that will amuse, amaze and possibly reveal new aspects of Ruskin.

The writer's introduction describes the book as "an

attempt to reveal the man himself as he was then what he said and thought and felt, warts and all - and a little of what he might mean to us now".

It certainly lives up to the “warts and all pledge”; entries under the letter P include paedophilia (not guilty) and, inevitably, pubic hair, as well as the more expected Pre-Raphaelites and Praeterita.

Michael Glover is a sharply funny writer, although the Victorian flourishes are occasionally a bit overdone (if understandably hard to resist). Some of the little details, such as Ruskin's predilection for baby talk in his private letters to Joan Severn or his brutal dismissal of Sheffield

LEARNING CURVE

John Ruskin and Nineteenthcentury Education edited by Valerie Purton.

Anthem Press, London £70 THE educational philosophy of John Ruskin’s was based on the idea that the good society achieved the full selffulfilment of its constituents. He saw respect for nature and the morality of a pre-industrial age as key to the rebirth of society. In Ruskin’s lecture The Storm-Clouds of the Nineteenth Century he notes the changing weather systems of Europe, attributing this to the growth of industry.

Ruskin would have supported the

council's offer of a home for his collection, are extraordinary. The Guild gets an honourable mention and comes off quite well after a thorough going over about Ruskin’s motives for setting it up. Glover also trots briskly through the stories of St George’s Museum in

growing calls for a holistic form of climate science, in both its ethical and scientific approach to nature, to be taught in contemporary schools.

Valerie Purton’s edited volume is divided into three sections: Changing the world, Libraries and the Arts, Christianity and Apocalypse. Her introduction relates the content of Ruskin’s 1858 Cambridge inaugural address on the opening of the Cambridge School of Art to the chapters that follow.

In the Christianity and Apocalypse section Keith Hanley writes about the dangers of secularising Ruskin’s thought, whilst Andrew Tate writes of apocalypse for Ruskin as the revelation of a destruction of moral values throughout nineteenth century capitalism’s progress. Ruskin’s educational aims should be placed in this context, as he felt we should orientate to a better future world in our actions.

Sara Atwood systemically describes Ruskin’s essential elements in education and Stuart Eagles compares and contrasts the educational work of Ruskin and Tolstoy. Ruskin and Tolstoy never met but both believed in nurturing souls of good quality and believed in schooling without competitive exams. Both wanted to share the wisdom of the past in their ideal communities, Tolstoy publishing Ruskin in translation in Russia.

Four of the chapters assess what Ruskin thought should be taught and how. Rachel Dickinson accounts for

Sheffield and the ill-fated farm project Ruskin set up in the city.

He mentions that Ruskin's writings about JMW Turner found a new approach to biography and the same could be said of this book.

You come away with a greater appreciation of Ruskin's character; his obsessions, successes, failings and prejudices.

It is also beautifullydesigned, as befits a volume whose first entry is ‘Aesthete’. The dictionary is well worth buying as a handy reference point and as a book to dip in and out of for the sheer fun of it.

JULIA ARMSTRONG

Julia Armstrong is a journalist in Sheffield.

Ruskin’s “art of dress” in teaching the ethics of sustainability through use of textiles.

Emma Sdegno describes Ruskin’s book dissemination projects and his perspective on reading as an act in the construction of meaning. Stephen Wildman notes the occasion of the use of photography in Fors Clavigera as a tool for access to great works of art.

Paul Jackson’s chapter is a study of Ruskin’s engagement with music.

In their pieces Jan Marsh and Edward James focus on Ruskin’s texts and explore their wider significance.

Marsh explores Sesames and Lilies and gender and education, whilst James assesses the importance of The King of the Golden River. He positions it as an early case of Ruskin exploring his concept of an ethical economic system.

In his 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire positions radical education as one in which education enables the oppressed to see their relation to their oppressors, and hence clear-sightedly change their situation.

Like Freire, Ruskin wanted people to see clearly; his educational philosophy aimed for this.

As this volume shows, Ruskin’s view was that self-fulfilment for everyone was possible. The book also sets out Ruskin’s understanding that constraints of conventionality had to be broken fully to achieve the full selffulfilment of all—something still recognised by Freire 100 years later.

HUGH HOBBS

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MORE BOOKS FULL TREATMENT

Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin.

Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, £40

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THE Yale Center for British Art at New Haven produced a most impressive publication to accompany its exhibition Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. (A reduced version of the exhibition then travelled to the Watts Gallery near Guildford in March, April and May 2020).

Nearly all the 20 Ruskin drawings in the Center’s collection are in the catalogue, a modest group reflecting the founder Paul Mellon’s lack of enthusiasm for the Victorian era. The Beinecke Library at Yale, however, makes up for this: the largest holding other than the Whitehouse Collection at Lancaster provides some wonderful manuscript material, including an 1842 -46 diary; a Stones of Venice notebook (M2) which evaded Whitehouse; fascinating annotated proofs for The Elements of Drawing, and a 14thcentury illuminated manuscript known as the Ruskin Bible. Also the evocative Post Bag with the engraved clasp “Prof. Ruskin, Brantwood”, reserved for his use in Coniston.

Some star items were borrowed, notably the 1848 Portal of St Lô from the Fogg in Harvard, the large South Side of St. Mark’s (shown last year in Venice, recently sold from a private collection) and The Pass of Killiecrankie, a sole British loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Center’s collection contributed complementary works by Copley Fielding, Prout, William Henry

Hunt and of course Turner. The glowing Fluelen (1845) appears, which belonged to Ruskin, but curiously not the large Lake of Geneva (c.1805) formerly hung in the Study at Brantwood.

The oil of Venice from the Porch of the Salute (c.1835), borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum, New York, was well known to Ruskin through its engraving by William Miller. Oddly, certain items have been catalogued which are not in the exhibition, including the Self-Portrait from the Morgan Library and several daguerreotypes from the Jacobson collection.

For an exhibition of fewer than 100 items – barely larger than most Ruskin Library displays of yesteryear – the catalogue has received the full Yale University Press treatment, a hefty hardback on high-quality paper, impeccably designed and with illustrations of sparkling clarity. An introduction by Tim Barringer, Professor of the History of Art, is followed by three excellent essays by Yale PhD students: Tara Contractor (Ruskin’s Sketching and Empowermen’), Victoria Hepburn (Ruskin’s First

Editions) and Judith Stapleton (Ruskin and the Work of Iron). Admirably full catalogue entries are by them, with contributions from four other Yale students.

Barringer offers a sensible introduction, inevitably trying to make Ruskin seem modern—“intuiting”, which presumably means foreshadowing, aspects of the fashionable Anthropocene agenda— but giving him the now familiar rap over the knuckles in respect of attitudes to slavery and the Confederacy, somewhat ironic in view of Elihu Yale’s connections with the slave trade in 1690s India.

Contractor has something to say about the Guild, understanding that Ruskin’s initiatives were always intended as experimental examples, although she wrongly states that the Guild “acquired” Laxey Mill on the Isle of Man. Stapleton imaginatively finds some good material on the theme of iron, while Hepburn’s is the outstanding essay, splendidly analysing the Dryad’s Waywardness plate in Modern Painters V in a masterful piece of Ruskinian synecdoche.

John Ruskin, Study of an Oak Leaf, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

There is a superfluous ‘Epilogue’ featuring work by the artist/architect Jorge Otero-Pailos. Very few errors have crept in: Clarkson Stanfield’s forename was not George. T.M. Rooke’s middle name was a family one, Matthews (not Matthew); Examples of the Architecture of Venice was issued only in fascicles, never as “a luxury folio”; and the geologist Lazarus Fletcher was knighted in 1916, so was not “Sir Lazarus” when he worked with Ruskin.

STEPHEN WILDMAN

Stephen Wildman is the retired Director of what was then the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University

INFECTIOUS ENTHUSIAM

Giotto and His Works in Padua,

by John Ruskin, introduction by Robert Hewison. David Zwirner Books, Ekphrais Series £8.95.

IN 1306 Giotto was commissioned to create a cycle of frescoes representing the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus on the interior walls and ceiling of the Arena or Scrovegni Chapel at Padua.

The chapel, which was owned by the Scrovegni family, was acquired by the city of Padova in 1880. The city now manages its conservation and closely regulated access. Kenneth Clark described Giotto as one of the “greatest masters of painted drama that has ever lived”.

This beautifully presented paperback is based on an out-of-print publication of the Arundel Society. In 1854 the society released thirty-eight woodcuts of the frescoes accompanied by an “explanatory notice” written by John Ruskin in 1853. At the time he was completing the final two volumes of The Stones of Venice. Ruskin had visited the chapel in 1841 and 1850, and before

writing his interpretation of the woodcuts had studied Giotto’s work in Florence. Ruskin had already written about Giotto in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and he would later refer to the Arena frescoes in his lectures and letters, notably in Fors Clavigera, where copies of some of the pictures, including those on Envy, Injustice and Charity, accompany his letters.

Incidentally, Marcel Proust, a great admirer and translator of Ruskin, included beautiful descriptions of the chapel (which he saw in 1900) in his In Search of Lost Time. Ruskin continued his interest in Giotto; in 1874 he visited Assisi to supervise the copying of the artist’s frescoes in the Basilica of Saint Francis for the Arundel Society.

The Arundel Society had been founded in 1849 to “preserve the record and diffuse a knowledge of the most important remains of painting and sculpture, to furnish valuable contributions towards the illustration of the history of Art, to elevate the standard of taste in England, and thus incidentally to exert a beneficial influence upon our native and national schools of painting and sculpture.” For an annual subscription members would receive engraved prints, initially of Fra Angelico and Giotto and later of other artists, including of the early Renaissance.

Ruskin’s Giotto was republished in 1860 by the Society and again in 1900

by George Allen as Giotto and his works in Padua: being an explanatory notice of the frescoes in the Arena Chapel. It is included in the Cook and Wedderburn Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin. Ruskin’s contribution, together with a copy of one of the original woodcuts, has now been published by David Zwirner Books, with the addition of good quality colour photographs of the frescoes, revised textual notes and an informative introduction by the Ruskin scholar, Robert Hewison. Ruskin’s contribution to the work comprises an introduction to Giotto and a not uncritical description of the woodcut copies of the frescoes, together with explanatory cross-references to the applicable biblical text, Vasari and Lord Alexander Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art. Ruskin, who believed Giotto was the greatest painter of medieval Italy, the “undisputed interpreter of religious truth”, summed-up the meaning and significance of the frescoes in this way: “Thus the walls of the chapel are covered with a continuous meditative poem on the mystery of the Incarnation, the acts of Redemption, the vices and virtues of mankind as

proceeding from their scorn or acceptance of that Redemption, and their final judgement”. Always the educator, Ruskin explained in the advertisement to the first edition that he hoped his remarks might be useful in “preventing the general reader from either looking for what the painter never intended to give, or missing the points to which his endeavours were really directed”.

When I saw the frescoes in 2007, I was struck by the colours in the works (especially the deep sky blues), the feeling of movement in the characters, the floating swooping attentive angels and several rather strange trees. The characters were not flat as I had observed in the works of other Italian masters of the period but threedimensional, with great expression and depth. I was reminded when reading this book not only of Ruskin’s great power of observation and of his ability to describe a picture and to explain its religious significance and artistic importance but also, most important, his willingness to express his emotional response to the subject.

For instance, when describing the face of St Anna in The Meeting at the Golden Gate, Ruskin notes how the artist “enhanced its sweetness” by giving a harder and grosser character to the heads of other figures and by the rough and weather-beaten countenance of a shepherd.

On The Watching of the Rods at the Altar, Ruskin writes that it was “difficult to look long at the picture without feeling a degree of anxiety”, while on The Kiss of Judas, he writes that it was evident that Giotto looked upon Judas mainly “as a sensual dullard, and foul-brained fool”. Ruskin’s enthusiasm for the works is infectious as he invites the reader to observe in The Virgin Mary Returns to Her House, the “pure wave from the back of the Virgin’s head to the ground; and again, the delicate swelling line along her shoulder and left arm..”, which he suggested should be compared with an Egyptian or Ninevite series of figures or any composition subsequent to the time of Raphael.

My visit to the chapel would have been enhanced if I had been able to refer to Ruskin’s explanations of the biblical context of each fresco and to have had my attention drawn to specific scenes that appealed to his sensibility, including of course, the all important facial expressions in Giotto’s memorable works.

LAWRIE GROOM

The artist and poet Lawrie Groom writes on local government and town planning and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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IN THE DARK

Victorian Environmental Nightmares edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D Morrison.

Palgrave Macmillan £79.99 THIS volume contributes to the emerging scholarship of Victorian ecocriticism, comprising discussion of actual and imagined environmental crises in the nineteenth century over twelve chapters. It captures the concern among Victorian writers with environmental destruction, witnessed in the detrimental effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, and recognised by Ruskin and others as the embodiment of social and moral decline.

The chapters by Companions Sara Atwood and Mark Frost centre on the moral degeneracy of the Victorian era expressed in the material form of environmental destruction. Atwood focusses on Ruskin’s mythopoeic approach to science and the environment, and Frost on the disaster fiction feeding the Victorian imagination. Both authors quote from Ruskin’s nightmarish description of the cloud he identified as “made of dead men’s souls”, first published in Fors Clavigera and repeated in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.

Frost relates Ruskin’s vision of the storm cloud to six texts of Victorian disaster fiction, exploring the extent to which they can be described as environmentalist. The fictional representations of smog, snow, flood and volcanic eruption depict humans as unfortunate victims rather than agents of destruction, and focus on the effect on human health rather than the environment, reflecting the anthropocentric view of the age.

In the blending of human history and natural history that characterises the Anthropocene, Frost contributes to the 60

assertion that humans become a force of nature in a geological sense, with smog seen as the intersection between nature and culture.

Sara Atwood shows that Ruskin’s mythopoeic approach to the environment is rooted in culture, in contrast to his American contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau and Muir whose celebration of pure, wild nature and optimism could not accommodate Ruskin’s darkness and mythic sophistication. She illustrates Ruskin’s darkening response to nature by quoting from his letters to Susanna Beever (an early Companion of the Guild) and suggests a causal relationship between Ruskin’s madness and his vision of the storm cloud is too simplistic, arguing that his sensitivity to nature was intensified by mental breakdown, rather than the product of it.

Both authors acknowledge the sense of prophecy in Ruskin’s environmental thinking, while cautioning against using the label “prophetic”. By concluding with the historical continuum linking Victorian environmental writing to current concerns, Mark Frost hints that the nightmare is far from over.

CAROLINE IKIN

Caroline Ikin is a curator at the National Trust and has recently completed a PhD on Ruskin’s garden at Brantwood.

ALL IN THE MIND

John Ruskin 21st-Century Oxford Authors. An anthology edited by Richard Lansdown.

Oxford University Press £90 THIS is a fine work of reference. The editor Professor Richard Lansdown from the University of Groningen, describes John Ruskin as “one of the most colossal figures in English

literature”. The book joins several anthologies of Ruskin’s writing, most of them are now out of print. Hence the need for this carefully selected and edited reference book.

Many think of John Ruskin in literary and artistic terms, but he was also an active advocate of social and economic reform, which he practised when he founded the Working Men’s College and the Guild of St George, and supported social experiments in education, farming, housing, the production of linen and metalwork, and retailing. This is amply illustrated in this collection of 80 extracts. Ruskin publicised his views in lectures, letters and books; he was never afraid to disagree with architects, capitalists, economists, experimental scientists, industrialists, manufacturers and republicans.

Indeed, William Butler Yeats on the first page of his draft Memoirs wrote of a quarrel with his father over Ruskin which came to such a height that in pushing the poet out of the room his father broke the glass in a picture with the back of his son’s head. That may have been about 1887; WB Yeats had been reading Ruskin’s Unto this Last.

As well as annoying Yeats’ father, a disciple of John Stuart Mill (whose theories of political economy were criticised by Ruskin), the book enraged the supporters of industrial capitalism and laissez-faire economics.

Following the editor’s informative introduction, Richard Lansdown’s John Ruskin is organised under three main topics: Ruskin the aesthete, Ruskin the prophet and Ruskin the activist. The section on Ruskin the prophet includes extracts from Essays on Political Economy (1863 & 1863) that became the book Munera Pulveris (1872) after the essays that were being published in Fraser’s Magazine were delayed because of interference by the publisher.

In one of the essays, Labour and Trade: The Disease of Desire, Ruskin scorns those who accumulate wealth for no apparent purpose except for reasons of passion, the “fever of gathering” and “pride of conquest”.

And when these “currency-holders” decide to spend some of their wealth, Ruskin considered that it “constantly happens” that, “what is unreasonably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful in being indulged by the rich and witnessed by the poor”.

Professor Lansdown writes that he “tried to cover as many aspects as possible of Ruskin’s work”

concentrating “on the range of Ruskin’s mind rather than the range of his texts” and acknowledges that he has “curtailed Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice and Fors Clavigera cruelly” and left out The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Unto This Last. The longest extracts are from Modern Painters and Love’s Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds.

All the extracts, including the quotations in the introduction are cross-referenced to the 39 volume Cook and Wedderburn Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (available online). The book includes a chronology of Ruskin’s life, a catalogue of the artists and writers Ruskin wrote about, comprehensive notes, further reading and an index of names. Surprisingly, there is no index of titles of the works in the book or a general index, both of which are in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors book on John Keats.

LAWRIE GROOM

LAND OF PLENTY

Ruskinland How John Ruskin Shapes Our World

by Andrew Hill.

Pallas Athene £19.99 ANDREW Hill is a very influential Companion. As the writer of a widelyread weekly column on management in the Financial Times, he spends much of his time seeking out ideas with which he can illuminate and challenge his readers. John Ruskin is one of his influences, and this striking book is the result of an abiding interest and involvement with Ruskin that began more than a decade ago.

The book is difficult to classify, a clever intermingling of commentary and reporting, driven by Hill’s drive to get to the bottom of things. To

explain how deeply Ruskin’s ideas have permeated society, he first tells the story of the man himself, a wellbalanced account of the complex evolution of Ruskin’s thought, his immediate and then fading (and now perhaps reemergent) eminence, and his personal life.

The deft historic narration is intermediated by Hill’s questing reporting; when he writes quite early in the book about Ruskin’s seeing and drawing, he visits The Ruskin School of Art at Oxford to ask about the importance of drawing there now, and to find out why the School has rebranded itself by losing “Drawing and Fine” Art from its original title.

Naturally, Hill is keen to reframe Ruskin for a 21st century readership, speaking of the blog-like aspects of Fors Clavigera, for example, while admitting that the limit of 280 characters permitted on Twitter might have inhibited him. The hugely popular 19th century public speaker might also have bridled at the 20minute time limit on speakers at today’s TED conferences, he suggests.

Nevertheless, Ruskin was—says Andrew Hill—the weaver of an extraordinary world-wide web of influences, and an exponent of how art, nature, science, history, politics sprang from and interacted with each other. To say nothing of the environment.

The contents pages give a sense of how wide-ranging this book Ruskinland is; they are expansively and suggestively written in the manner of a 19th century novel. A sample from the Landscape and Nature chapter: “Trains unexpectedly praised by R. R. as a cultural pillar of modern Lake District. Author sits on Ruskin’s Seat, Brantwood. Ruskin Land: rural compromises and contradictions.

Sustainability. R compares Bradford to Pisa. R’s influence on town planning, garden cities, suburbs and villages.

Author speculates about R’s view of green belt. R on “nimbyism”.

This stream of consciousness continues, but Andrew Hill is never uncritically swept away by the Great Man; at one stage he compares him (at least in part) with the gushy natureadmirer Basil Fotheringhton-Thomas at the fictional Skool of the 1950s, St Custard’s.

Hill first encountered Ruskin in 2009 when he bought a copy of Clive Wilmer’s Ruskin anthology during a visit to Brantwood. He was intrigued enough to write a Financial Times column about Ruskin’s relevance to modern business, and sought further

enlightenment from Wilmer, then the new Master. Andrew Hill soon became a Companion, and out of that came the preface to Unto This Last that Hill wrote in 2010 for his present publisher. In that he explained how the four essays, written in 1862, were so relevant in the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. It is not surprising that Ruskinland has some sympathetic passages on the Guild, Ruskin Land, Ruskin in Sheffield, and a parade of Companionable names and faces.

Like Ruskin himself for much of his life, the reporter Andrew Hill keeps on the move throughout the book, He ends up somewhere JR never ventured: the unincorporated community township of Ruskin in Florida, not so far from Tampa. It was set up on Ruskinite principles in 1909, and Hill finds traces of that influence, and people who have grown up under it, a poignant American outpost And as he contemplates the shaping influence of Ruskin at the end of this energetic and very informed survey, Andrew Hill remains impressed. It is clear, he writes, that the work Ruskin began, “is never-ending and endlessly relevant”.

PETER DAY

PROGRESSIVE

Bloke’s Progress How Darren found new meaning to life - with help from John Ruskin.

Written by Kevin Jackson, Drawn by Hunt Emerson.

Knockabout and the Ruskin Foundation £12.99 IN this three volume comic book, Kevin Jackson and Hunt Emerson have given us a wonderfully astute, thoughtful and irreverent scamper— not least for its hero Darren Bloke’s scruffy and wise dog, Skittle — addressing three of the key pillars > 61

> of Ruskin’s concerns: How to be Rich, How to See, and How to Work.

Darren is Mr Everyman. As he confronts matters of money, how to understand the way the world works and is made and the meaning of work itself (with love lost and love found thrown in along the way) he encounters the playful spirit of Mr Ruskin. The great man gently but persistently offers up his thoughts and transforms Darren’s life for the better.

In the intriguing alchemy of this writer and artist working together, they have achieved something fresh and new in Ruskin literature; a fun (and funny), lively and affectionate exploration of what makes Ruskin’s ideas so potent in the modern world.

As the three books unfold, one of the many visual enchantments is the way in which Hunt Emerson captures the sense of Ruskin watching Darren; there is always a benevolent but beady look in his eye. He wants this to be Darren’s awakening, not something imposed upon him by a high and mighty teacher. His powers as a spirit allow him to take Darren (and the ever faithful Skittle) high into the sky to survey mountains and clouds, or shrunk down among the microbes within a dead animal, and they find beauty in both.

In the third volume, How To Work, something extraordinary: the fourth wall comes down, and Ruskin and Darren start to talk to us, the reader, and we start to answer back. This device allows the authors to tackle some of the most frequent modern day quibbles about Ruskin’s current relevance. A wonderfully Ruskinian device, as the story, with Ruskin at its heart, invites us in and includes us.

Ruskin’s ideas belong to us all, they seem to say, and this witty and beautifully-realised expansion of the comic’s reach underlines the heartfelt sincerity of the entire project. A tour de force, recommended for all ages.

SIMON SELIGMAN

Simon Seligman is the Guild’s Communications and Membership Officer 62

AGM 2018: JOHN HOLMES ON THE OXFORD MUSEUM Guild Director Peter Burman writes: ONE of the delights of the Guild AGM is that we know we will hear a well-presented and well-argued lecture about a Ruskinian topic or connection which will add both to our knowledge and to our pleasure. At the 2018 AGM Professor John Holmes of the University of Birmingham did not disappoint. His lecture grew out of his fine new book, The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. And it concerned the building in which we were meeting, the Oxford Museum.

Ruskin was inclined to set himself as centre-stage in writing and speaking about the Oxford Museum. His relationship with the talented Irish carvers, James and John O’Shea, tends to be prominent in earlier literature.

But John Holmes proposed to “decentre Ruskin in order to show how thoroughly collaborative the project to build the Museum really was, with Victorian science and PreRaphaelite art as vital to its conception and execution as the ideals of Ruskinian Gothic”.

Of all the sources quoted by John Holmes the one which I now would most like to read and ponder is George Edmund Street’s 1853 paper An Urgent Plea for the Revival of True Principles of Architecture in the Public Buildings of the University of Oxford.

This takes us at once into the heart of the Gothic Revival in the British Isles.

Street was the Oxford Diocesan Architect, much of his best work is in Oxford itself and in the villages and towns of the diocese of Oxford.

John Holmes’s quotations from Street’s paper showed how he had a clear set of reasons for advocating the use of Gothic style and how Street had been influenced by Ruskin. For instance he wrote: “Surely, where nature is to be enshrined, there especially ought every carved stone and every ornamental device to bear her marks and to set forth her loveliness.”

John Holmes’s lecture gave proper place to the overriding influence of Ruskin’s great Oxford friend, Henry Acland. Acland, he said, “gave the building both its conceptual unity and its rich diversity as a vision of nature fashioned in stone, iron and glass, and he could see that the finished – or unfinished – whole contained, as all

great art does, possibilities that had not been deliberately placed there.”

Ruskin’s role, he determined, is not as the presiding genius but “probably best understood as that of a mentor”.

As a mentor, Ruskin was able to advocate that the building should be as close as possible to the principles he had been advocating for architecture in his Seven Lamps of Architecture and Stones of Venice; as he saw it the Museum was “literally the first building raised in England since the close of the 15th century, which has fearlessly put to new trial this old faith in nature, and in the genius of the unassisted workman, who gathered out of nature the materials he needed”.

What John Holmes made clearer than anyone before is how closely some of the key members of the PreRaphaelite Movement, in its first phase, were involved in the museum: for instance, the sculptors Thomas Woolner, John Lucas Tapper and H. H. Armstead. Also involved, through Ruskin, was the artist The Revd Richard St John Tyrwhitt whose two enormous mural paintings are in what is now the office of the Director of the Museum: those of us who are Directors of the Guild of St George had the pleasure of holding our Board meeting in that room the day before the Companions’ Day; those paintings are truly astonishing. He is a painter whose story should be better known.

Also illustrated in the Lecture booklet (details on ‘The Companion’ inside back cover) are twelve sheets of working designs by Ruskin towards decorative carving for the museum’s front windows, strongly Venetian in character. John Holmes shows how one of the ground-floor windows, carved by James O’Shea, evolves out of three of these sketches, but with significant changes of the elements which Ruskin proposed.

There seems always to be a tension in Ruskin between his advocacy of the freedom of the artist-craftsman and his wanting to control every detail (as did many of the Arts & Crafts architects who read and rejoiced in that part of The Stones of Venice which is called The Nature of Gothic). Perhaps we should not make an icon of consistency when architects and artists are finding their way, as was the case with the revival of the Gothic styles of architecture.

The well-proven conclusion of the lecture was that “The Oxford Museum was a unique collaboration between scientists, artists and designers, in which Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites each played an important role”.

AN EDUCATION Janet Barnes was the first director of the Ruskin Gallery.

She talked to Peter Day about her life in the arts.

IT WAS Janet Barnes who thought up the idea of the National Gallery Ruskin conference (page 22), a landmark event in a lifetime of Ruskinian activities. Not quite a lifetime, actually. Although she was born and bred in Sheffield and read English at Sheffield University, Ruskin, she says, wasn’t really mentioned. But he came into her life—and stayed there—in 1981, in her late 20s, when she was working at Sheffield Museums.

The Director of Galleries, Julian Spalding (later a Master of the Guild), had just negotiated the return of the Ruskin Collection from Reading University to Sheffield. Janet was the curator who (as she puts it) “checked the collection back in”, and it was put into store. Then in 1984, the building of the Ruskin Gallery started, and Janet Barnes was put in charge of that and the Ruskin Craft Gallery. “I was then on the Ruskin adventure,” she says, introducing herself to all the aspects of the collection that John Ruskin had thought important for the working men of Sheffield. “It was enriching; it was the best education I have had,” she thinks.

“In so many different areas: geology, history, architecture, art. The key to the Guild Collection is that it was not about Ruskin really; it was about what he felt was important.”

“I never became a Ruskinian; I kept that curatorial distance. I didn’t get lost in the footnotes, which a lot of people do. I tried to put on and display what he was talking about, I didn’t really do much on him”. This approach “saved her”, she says. “It was an adventure, but I didn’t go down the rabbit hole. It widened everything for me: reading about Venice and then finally going there for the first time and seeing it in the light of what Ruskin had been writing about: that was a fantastic experience.”

In 1999 Janet Barnes became director of the Crafts Council in London, just after it came under the direct influence of the Arts Council. “My career has

Janet Barnes CBE: 2010 always been going into institutions that were going through big changes.”

Were there Ruskin influences in that job? “Yes, craft had gone almost into art and started to lose its grip on shifting into more conceptual areas. It is very much about using materials..that is what I hang onto when I talk about craft. Ruskin was in the back of my mind; once encountered, I don’t think he ever goes away. It’s difficult to forget about Ruskin.”

Running the Crafts Council was a very managerial job. “I then felt I wanted a difficult task that was back in a museum,” she says. So, in 2002, she became the founding director of the new York Museums Trust. It was a large museum and gallery service being taken out of local government control and being put into the hands of a charitable trust. “It was a major culture shift; I had already experienced that in Sheffield.” She was appointed CBE for her work in York.

Janet Barnes is a long-standing Companion who was a Director “for 20 odd years,” she says. Her responsibility was Sheffield, the place she has always lived in. The place where Ruskin-inSheffield has been happening.

“Ruth Nutter just ran with it,” she says. So at almost 150, is the Guild still relevant? “Yes I think it does still have a job to do,” she says. “In a way it’s even more relevant than it ever was.

What surprises me is that so many of the things that Ruskin wrote about and cared about ring bells now.”

“I think that under Clive’s leadership, we’ve been able to explore the Directors’ interests; obviously with Ruskin Land, unknown and undeveloped until recently. Ruskin-in-

THE PRESS, YORK

Sheffield, too, has been really really important.” Janet Barnes thinks that perhaps the Guild has been “rather too expansive”. A new Master might rein things in, she thinks.

The National Gallery Conference happened because in 2015 Janet Barnes ran into the director of the National Gallery Gabriele Finaldi at the Museum of the Year Awards ceremony.

“Do you know Ruskin’s 200th anniversary is coming up?” she asked.

“The National Gallery needs to do something. He was very important in your history.” The Director asked her to email him, which she did. And then she heard nothing.

But then, two years after that encounter, retired from her job in York, she got a note from Susanna Avery-Quash at the National Gallery saying that Gabriele Finaldi had decided there should be a conference.

And so of course there was, organised

by Janet and Susanna.

“It just fell into place,” said Janet.

The result was an intense and intensely interesting two days, arranged around the theme dear to Janet’s heart: Ruskin as educator.

The bicentenary events have certainly raised awareness. But what of Ruskin’s future, now?

“He becomes very compartmented,” she says. “People pick a bit of him and run with it. It’s very difficult to grasp the depth and extent of his thinking.. and his influence. He ran around and seeded lots of things, but he was really at the mercy of other people for getting them done.”

Janet Barnes is one of the Ruskin people who has got a lot done.

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RUSKIN 200: into the future JOHN RUSKIN advised people to cut the word “utopian” out of their dictionary altogether. “Things are either possible or impossible,” he wrote. “If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it”.

2019 was a momentous year for the Guild. Andrew Hill, management editor of the Financial Times, wonders what happens next.

The Guild of St George remains full of possibility. It still cleaves to the noble aim of making the world a happier place. “Happiness” is not a word that is heard much in the orthodox management literature, yet it was a touchstone for Ruskin. He said his efforts to teach artisans how to draw at the Working Men’s College in the 1850s were directed “not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter”. After the bicentenary, this is surely a strong foundation on which to build.

Of course, Ruskin’s wide-ranging ideas point to a variety of other possible paths: improving people’s ability to see clearly; encouraging thoughtful urban planning and building; or campaigning for a more fruitful and useful co-existence between humans and our environment.

In the field of business, leaders are still a long way from meeting what I once laid out as five Ruskinian lessons for chief executives, who wish to be “honest merchants”: “Provide for the nation”, which leads naturally to Ruskin’s assertion that “it is no more [the merchant’s] function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend” - a message to corporate leaders as they set their own and others’ pay.

Be honest, not only in the sense of behaving morally, but in striving to produce goods and services of “perfectness and purity.

Lead, with a view to becoming that “rich” man who has “the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others”.

Collaborate and co-operate, rather than pursuing competition - “a law of death”, in Ruskin’s eyes - at all costs.

Create wealth, in the way intended when Ruskin pronounced that there was “no wealth but life” and conceived the concept of wealth’s toxic opposite illth.

It is, however, in the workplace not the boardroom that I think the Guild could focus its utopian ambitions.

It could act as an important lever for change and ANDREW HILL has been a Companion since 2009. He is the author of ‘Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World’, Pallas Athene 2019, and management editor and associate editor of the Financial Times.

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economic justice in the 21st century, drawing strength from the fact that others are already recognising the importance of worker well-being and autonomy. They range from multinationals such as Michelin, which is trying to give its frontline workers more power to decide how they work, to Unto This Last, the East End furniture workshop founded by the Guild companion Olivier Geoffroy.

Geoffroy is on a quest to find new ways to use all the assets available to his team – including machine technology Ruskin generally loathed – to become more productive, while making jobs more interesting.

Not everyone can take for granted they have work, let alone that it is fulfilling. At the Working Men’s College, now in Camden and restyled as the WMC, 75 per cent of the learners are now women. Much of the effort of educators there is lifting people onto the first rung of the working ladder, through teaching them English as a second language or basic, essential maths skills. Ruskin, were he alive today, would be worried about the excesses and exploitation in those parts of the economy where these bottom-of-the-rung jobs are found.

In that spirit, the Guild could act on Ruskin’s triad of pre-conditions for happiness at work. For workers to be happy, he wrote, “these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it”.

These could become three lamps lighting the way for the Guild as it advances.

First, fitness. These days, this means more than just physical fitness, but proper education, training, and valuable apprenticeships that lead to mastery.

Second, Ruskin wrote, happy workers must not do too much of it. I take this as a prescription for better regulation of work, more humane management and smarter oversight of the growing “gig economy”.

Third, the sense of success. This is Ruskin’s excellent description for the small victories that, properly acknowledged and rewarded, give impetus and meaning to day-to-day work.

I can see a role for the Guild in recognising and rewarding people that achieve mastery— how about a Guild Master Craftsperson of the Year?— and for promoting good practice in the workplace.

The Guild could set a benchmark not just for the best place to work, but the happiest place to work, the sort of place that, on John Ruskin’s own terms, ought, as a by-product of the workers’ own happiness and sense of fulfilment, to produce the best work.

Recent publications from The Guild of St George

RUSKIN, THE PRE-RAPHAELITES AND THE OXFORD MUSEUM The 2018 Ruskin Lecture by Professor John Holmes tells the story of one of the most remarkable 19th century buildings in Oxford. £8

RUSKIN AND CRAFTSMANSHIP Ruskin’s ideas continue to inspire the makers and craftspeople of today. A new reprint of the 2015 Ruskin Lecture

by Marcus Waithe. £8

GENEVIEVE PILLEY The dedicated life of the woman who gave 50 years of her life to working at the Ruskin Museum at Meersbrook.

Written by Companion Helen Parker, a volunteer with Ruskin in Sheffield. £10

THE RUSKINS AND THE DOMECQS James S Dearden on the family links to the Domecq sherry business on which John Ruskin’s fortune was build. A talk originally delivered by Manuel Domecq at Brantwood in 1969. £10

SEARCHING FOR RUSKIN’S UTOPIA The playwright, activist and teacher Sara Woods gave this lecture at the symposium organised by the Guild during the Ruskin exhibition at Two Temple Place in London in 2019. £6

WHAT THE GUILD OF St GEORGE DOES Clive Wilmer’s 2019 Ruskin Lecture reflects on what he has learnt about Ruskin and the Guild during his 10 years as its Master. £6

33 other titles are still in print. Details on the Guild website: www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk

Ruskin 200

One of an international flourish of Bicentenary events: The Power of Seeing at Two Temple Place in London.

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