Examining the wide-ranging implications of Ruskin's engagement with his contemporaries and followers, this collection is organized around three related themes: Ruskin's intellectual legacy and the extent to which its address to working men and women and children was realised in practice; Ruskin's followers and their sites of influence, especially those related to the formation of collections, museums, archives and galleries representing values and ideas associated with Ruskin; and the extent to which Ruskin's work constructed a world-wide network of followers, movements and social gestures that acknowledge his authority and influence. As the introduction shows, Ruskin's continuing digital presence is striking and makes a case for Ruskin's persistent presence. The collection begins with essays on Ruskin's intellectual presence in nineteenth-century thought, with some emphasis on his interest in the education of women. This section is followed by one on Ruskin's followers from the mid-nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism that looks at a broad range of cultural activities that sought to further, repudiate, or exemplify Ruskin's work and teaching. Working-class education, the Ruskinian periodical, plays, and science fiction are all considered along with the Bloomsbury Group's engagement with Ruskin's thought and writing. Essays on Ruskin abroad-in America, Australia, and India round out the collection.

Ruskin's letters to Norton reflect and express, often more vividly than his own public prose, the spiritual, amatory, artistic, and cultural preoccupations of Ruskin's life. This 1987 volume presents a complete and accurate record of the exchanges, which comprise 333 from Ruskin to Norton and 63 in return.

A revelatory history of the first artist collective in the United States and its effort to reshape nineteenth-century art, culture, and politics The American Pre-Raphaelites founded a uniquely interdisciplinary movement composed of politically radical abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. Active during the Civil War, this dynamic collective united in a spirit of protest, seeking sweeping reforms of national art and culture. Painting Dissent recovers the American Pre-Raphaelites from the margins of history and situates them at the center of transatlantic debates about art, slavery, education, and politics. Artists such as Thomas Charles Farrer and John Henry Hill championed a new style of landscape painting characterized by vibrant palettes, antipicturesque compositions, and meticulous brushwork. Their radicalism, however, was not solely one of style. Sophie Lynford traces how the American Pre-Raphaelites proclaimed themselves catalysts of a wide-ranging reform movement that staged politically motivated interventions in multiple cultural arenas, from architecture and criticism to collecting, exhibition design, and higher education. She examines how they publicly rejected their prominent contemporaries, the artists known as the Hudson River School, and how they offered incisive critiques of antebellum society by importing British models of landscape theory and practice. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of archival material, Painting Dissent transforms our understanding of how American artists depicted the nation during the most turbulent decades of the nineteenth century.

The Last Ruskinians : Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle tells the forgotten story of the influence of the British writer and critic John Ruskin on a group of American painters and collectors during the late 19th century. Ruskin's influence in the U.S. was largely disseminated by the legendary Charles Eliot Norton (the nation's first professor of art history, who taught at Harvard from 1874 to 1898), and through his associate, Charles Herbert Moore. The exhibition consists almost exclusively of watercolors - Ruskin's favorite medium. Displaying Ruskin's philosophy of 'truth to nature' in art, the works include botanicals, architectural details, landscapes, views of Venice, and copies after antique, medieval, and Renaissance art. Included are ten works by Ruskin himself, all drawn from the Harvard collections, and an equal number by his friend Moore, a Harvard drawing instructor and the Fogg Art Museum's first director. Also represented are works by Henry Roderick Newman, an American in Florence whose art was widely admired, and works by a second generation of American Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Joseph Lindon Smith, Harold B. Warren, and George H. Hallowell. One catalog essay discusses the influence in the U.S. of Ruskin and of Norton, who helped to shape the collecting of some of Boston's greatest connoisseurs and collectors, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson, and Denman W. Ross. The other essays explore Charles Herbert Moore's life, his little-known but exquisite watercolors, and his contribution to the teaching of art and art history, using Ruskin's methodology in his courses at Harvard.