Author: Harriet Hill-Payne

Welcome to The Ruskin’s blog: the place for articles, stories and views from The Ruskin.

We are returning to the blog for our new season’s programme, Tomorrow’s World Today: Ruskin, Art and Science. This summer, The Ruskin has partnered with the Royal Society for the 2021 edition of Summer Science, a week-long festival celebrating cutting edge UK science.

From 8th July, explore two digital exhibitions co-curated by The Ruskin’s Director Professor Sandra Kemp and the Royal Society, Head of Library, Keith Moore. Both exhibitions are part of The Ruskin’s combined research and exhibition programmes on Google Arts and Culture and introduced in the post Cloud Perspectives, written by Sandra Kemp, for the Royal Society blog. 

Read the blog post Cloud Perspectives here. 

From the first photographic images of glaciers, to experimental studies of aerial perspective, to Ruskin’s classification system for Alpine geology, Painting with Sunlight: Ruskin and Science highlights drawings, paintings and daguerreotypes from Lancaster University’s Ruskin Whitehouse Collection, alongside works by Victorian scientists from the Royal Society archive.

Explore Painting with Sunlight: Ruskin and Science here. 

Ruskin attended the Royal Society Soirée in 1862 for astronomer Warren de la Rue’s lecture on the total eclipse of the sun. The Royal Society Soirées: Highlights from the Summer Science Exhibition looks back to the origins of the Summer Science festival in the interplay of the arts and sciences at these spectacular displays, from the 1840s to-date.

Explore The Royal Society Soirées: Highlights from the Summer Science Exhibition here. 

These exhibitions open our year-round programme of digital exhibitions and events. Join us in October for the Library and COP26 Festivals at Lancaster Unviersity. Encompassing exhibitions, events, research and learning, Tomorrow’s World Today will explore Ruskin’s farsighted contribution to scientific innovation, and his contemporary relevance to pressing social, cultural and environmental concerns. Ruskin was a polymath and his works capture the explosion of knowledge resulting from the 19th century voyages of discovery, which shaped our scientific understanding of the natural world today. Two years in the making, the programme builds on the 2019 exhibition Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future, which you can revisit via virtual tour.

This blog is the place where we’ll share perspectives on Ruskin and science: with articles and ‘think-pieces’ from our speakers and workshop participants, views from contemporary artists responding to Ruskin’s art and ideas, and in-depth explorations of individual pieces in the collection, from new readings of iconic works, to new research into parts of the collection that have not been widely studied or displayed to-date. Our next blog is on a work that has remained unidentified until now, in partnership with the Natural History Museum. 

Keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter, and following us on Twitter and Instagram. You can explore the collection in our Google Arts and Culture exhibits; Recover and Reimagine: Lancaster’s Future Heritage, an online exhibition co-produced with Lancaster’s museums for International Museum Day; and through the collection pages on our website. We invite you to browse the catalogue, and tell us what you’d like to know about Ruskin and scientific innovation: you may find it featured in Tomorrow’s World Today.

Our latest blog post comes from Professor Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour). The post, which follows Laurence’s paper given as part of the Ruskin Beyond Britain series, will be extended for publication in the next issue of The Ruskin Review. 

From Ruskin’s first visit to France with his parents in 1825 to his final continental tour of 1888, one gets a sense that he always went through France on his way to somewhere else, somewhere beyond: beyond to Switzerland, where he thought about settling down for a while or beyond to Italy and Venice, his second home. And yet reconsidering Ruskin’s mention of French topography and natural sites reveals how much its contrasting reliefs came to symbolize and embody Ruskin’s artistic and poetic vision of landscape – a vision grounded in the visible (an insight) but later transformed into an inscape (through hindsight). Beyond the historical monuments of Northern part of France and Notre Dame-de Paris that certainly were for Ruskin a well-known source of inspiration, other and perhaps less prestigious parts of France thus gradually became significant sites whose presence can be traced in filigree in his multiple writings from his diaries to his art criticism.

Among those places, in my seminar paper, I chose to focus on two particular sites that I argued were foundational not only in Ruskin’s perception of France but also on his conception of the relation between nature and art: The Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps, and the Jura mountains – two focal points that purposefully offered a contrastive view of Ruskin’s French experience.

The first part of my investigation was devoted to the Romantic lens through which Ruskin viewed parts of the French landscape and architecture and demonstrated the parallel features between his representation of the country and the popular illustrated travel guides published in France throughout the nineteenth century and whose visual impact would have been great not just on Ruskin but on all the English travellers at the time.

Among them, the most important one was the monumental edition of Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France, a hallmark of romanticism comprising a volume dedicated to the Dauphiné (published between 1843 and 1854) and another one dedicated to the Jura (published between 1828 and 1829).

In my understanding, looking at those earlier Romantic descriptions of the Chartreuse and the Jura in relation to Ruskin’s travel through the Continent first helps us situate his experience within a European context by showing his aesthetic alignment with earlier British poet-travellers such as Lord Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth and French “poètes-promeneurs” such as Rousseau. it also invites us to think about landscape as a transformative experience that may resurface many years on in later work, influencing both content and form.

In my contention, Ruskin’s early visual impressions of the Grande Chartreuse and the “mont cachés du Jura” can thus be said to have mapped out “en creux” Ruskin’s visual imagination and contributed to his singular appreciation and later rendering of landscape in drawing, writing and even teaching. While hidden from immediate view compared to the more salient lines of the Montblanc, embedded in memory and probably tied in with early romance, those early souvenirs of picturesque France could ultimately be interpreted as a marker of Ruskin’s deeply-rooted attachment to France as Scotland’s age-old ally and companion land.

Professor Laurence Roussillon-Constanty is Professor in English Literature, Art and Epistemology at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (France) and a Member of the Research Group ALTER. She is President of the French Victorian Society (SFEVE) and a Companion of the Guild of Saint George. She is the author of Méduse au miroir: Esthétique romantique de Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2007) and co-editor (with David Clifford) of The Rossettis then and Now: Cosmopolitans in Victorian London (London: Anthem Press, 2003). She also co-authored a translation into French of a selection of texts from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Pau: PUP, 2006).

Dr. Sarah Casey, Senior Lecturer in Drawing and Installation at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, writes,

In his Elements of Drawing (1857), Ruskin wrote ‘I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw’ (John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1970 edition , p.13).

 

In other words, he advocated drawing as a means for seeing and understanding the world around us.  This ethos   of using drawing to better know the world also underpins the learning objectives of Lancaster University’s undergraduate module ‘Documentary Drawing’ taught by Gerry Davies and Sarah Casey to students in Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts. The module is structured around a series of weekly challenges each requiring students to adapt their graphic approach to best capture the specificities of the environment and subject matter presented to them. What better way to introduce this approach to drawing than visit the current exhibition The Ruskin Museum of the Near Future?

So, last week, a group of 20 students came to The Ruskin armed with notebook and pencil.  Students were introduced to Ruskin’s approach to drawing and saw first hand examples of the way he and other artists examined a range of subjects – from environment to architecture – using graphic means. Their task was to explore the exhibition and identify drawings of particular interest from which to make a transcription. In keeping with the module aims, no cameras are allowed. The challenge was to identify point of interest and work out how to make a record of these using only their notebook and pencil.

In addition to viewing the exhibition, the students also had the opportunity to work from collection items in the study room. A number of notebooks and drawings from the archive had been brought out specifically for this purpose. For many students, this was their first archival experience. The opportunity to learn how an archive works, the protocol around studying archival material, such as restrictions on drawing materials, touching and liquids all formed part of their training as investigative drawers.

So, after two hours of almost hallowed silence and deep concentration, we were exhausted. But we had at least six of drawings each to take away as a reminder of this wonderful opportunity and of our capacity to see the world more clearly, when we slow down and take the time to draw it.