Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery London are always given a lot of press coverage. They almost have a competition running with the Royal Academy to see who can attract the most visitors to their blockbuster shows. “Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites” currently on at the Tate is getting even more than its fair share of publicity due, I believe to its particularly British profile. 

What is more recognizably English, what has filled more plush calendars and gift cards than Pre-Raphaelite painting? Those flaxen haired heroines of  English folklore and poetry The Lady of Shaillot, Guinevere, Fair Rosamond, Shakespeare’s ‘Ophelia’, Tennyson’s the Miller’s Daughter in Arthur Hughes  ‘April Love’ of 1856 – British teenagers still hang these images on their bedroom walls even if they never bother to learn who painted them. As for Ruskin, now here is a name we all recognize merely by the amount of art institutions and tourist attractions around the country bearing his name and by the amount of books published of his life and writings. 
He was the subject of a Timothy Hilton television program recently and this has instigated a kind of Ruskin fever throughout England’s capital.  At the Tate Gallery bookshop people were snatching up paperback editions of Ruskin’s long forgotten works happy to re-discover and re-assess this national hero. They merrily skip over facts like his obssessional love for a ten-year-old girl, his mental illness and his cold treatment of his wife. If Ruskin is the subject of a Tate exhibition, then he must be a good chap, besides which everybody loves ‘an eccentric’.

The idea of this exhibition timed to coincide with the centenary of Ruskin’s death, is to demonstrate the influence Ruskin had on the nineteenth century as art critic, intellectual and academic. It is not really the purpose to reinstate Ruskin as an accomplished artist although you could be forgiven for thinking so. A huge selection of his own art works are included more or less as evidence Ruskin was profoundly qualified to comment on art in general and as documents that chart his biography. They also serve to outline his particular fixations; verisimilitude of nature and acute observation of detail born by a religious reverence for the perfect beauty he found in the natural world. The French painter Rosa Bonheur accused him of seeing nature ‘with tiny eyes, just like a bird’. 
 

His scientific and spiritual curiosity in the mystery of creation is reflected in the exquisite drawing of a crab - one of a large group of natural history studies that recall those of Albrecht Durer in their ability to rise above their intended purposes.

Likewise his meticulous recording of architectural details sketched during his travels abroad.

Turner is often called England’s greatest painter of all time and Ruskin was his champion, defending the artist’s revolutionary paintings in his famous book ‘Modern Painters’, essential reading on Art History curriculums. 
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) , whom Ruskin called ‘the father of modern art’  is the focus of the first part of the exhibition as we explore early influences on Ruskin. At the age of twenty-three having read damning criticism of Turner’s work Ruskin declared he was going to ‘blow the critics out of the water’.  His reaction was to write ‘Modern Painters’ published in 1843. 

Turner’s ‘Snow Storm – Steam Boat’ had been exhibited at the Royal Academy London and panned by the critics. This is how Ruskin described it in his book :

‘One of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner. Of course it was not understood; his finest works never are.’

For Turner, the painting was a faithful record of an event he witnessed 

Ruskin’s admiration of Turner is central to understanding his aesthetic  credo  “Nothing must come between Nature and the artist’s sight; nothing between God and the artist’s soul.” and also to explaining the abiding presence of Turner’s art in Pre-Raphaelite painting which at first glance, is not self-evident. 

Pre-Raphaelites fans will not be disappointed as the whole spectrum of the group’s styles is represented here from William Dyce’s ‘Titian preparing to make his first Essay in Colouring’ (1856) to Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ ‘The Golden Stairs’ (1876-80).

Fifteenth century Italian paintings  ‘The Ruskin Madonna’ by Andrea del Verrochio (1435-1488) from Ruskin’s own collection and Bartolomeo Vivarini’s ‘Virgin and Child’ show the basis for his ideal of human beauty; the prototypes he pressed upon the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. 
 

Bartolomeo Vivarini (active 1450-1499) Virgin and Child,  The Fogg Art Museum

Robert Hewison writes an insightful catalogue essay which equates the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 with London’s Millennium Dome as  “the new culture of visual consumption” providing a historical context for Ruskin’s activities and Victorian culture. Mid-nineteenth century confidence was reflected in visual art just as in the year 2000 YBA (Young British Art) is considered at the forefront of the world’s art scene and has contributed dramatically to boosting the nation’s ego. Commentators have already pointed out that Turner’s paintings shown at the R.A. in the 1840’s were probably considered as shocking as the works in SENSATION, the exhibition of young British art that rocked New York at the close of the millennium.

‘Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites’ is an exhibition that celebrates Britishness and whilst the works on display may be a little too weary to stimulate the senses afresh, as a whole it is a valid comment on the authority of art and how it can shape an era.

RLG

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