Stones and Lilies: Ruskin's legacy since 1969

On a cold Spring morning in 1969, a small group of scholars gathered at Brantwood, John Ruskin's last home in the Lake District (fig. 1). They were commemorating Ruskin's 150th birthday and sharing their interests and knowledge. Taking that historical conference as its starting point, this...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of art historiography 2020-06 (22), p.1-12
Main Author: Cooper, Suzanne Fagence
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Art criticism
Art galleries & museums
Art history
Conferences
Critics
Gender studies
Historiography
Library collections
Ruskin, John (1819-1900)
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Summary:On a cold Spring morning in 1969, a small group of scholars gathered at Brantwood, John Ruskin's last home in the Lake District (fig. 1). They were commemorating Ruskin's 150th birthday and sharing their interests and knowledge. Taking that historical conference as its starting point, this article will describe and explain various threads of scholarship and outreach which have taken place over the intervening fifty years. It will draw on interviews with Ruskin specialists from different disciplines, carried out in anticipation of Ruskin's 200th anniversary in 2019.1 Ruskin's legacy encompasses institutions and buildings with which he is associated, directly and indirectly, including Bembridge School, the collections of the Guild of St George in Sheffield, and the Ruskin Library at the University of Lancaster. It also embraces productive landscapes at Brantwood, Cumbria and Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Worcestershire. This study will consider the pressures of caring for physical relics of Ruskin's life, and the need for growth and renewal. It will also draw attention to the gaps we would now recognise in the conference line-up of March 1969, especially the contested place of Ruskin in gender studies.2 The multi-faceted nature of Ruskin's afterlife in the last fifty years has recently been revealed in the diverse activities that have sprung up in relation to the Ruskin200 anniversary.
ISSN:2042-4752