Van Akin Burd, who died aged 101, devoted most of his academic career to the study of John Ruskin. The author of around 50 scholarly articles on the Victorian thinker, artist and philanthropist, and the editor of four editions of his writings, Burd was by common consent the towering figure in modern Ruskin studies. In 1951, he took a position at the State University of New York at Cortland, where, despite attractive offers from elsewhere, he remained for his whole career.
Perhaps his greatest discovery came one day in the early 1960s when, while reading Ruskin on JMW Turner at the Pierpont Morgan library in New York, Burd happened to consult a collection of letters written by Ruskin for the headteacher and pupils of an experimental school for girls at Winnington in Cheshire. The girls were known to have inspired The Ethics of the Dust (1866), perhaps the strangest book in the Ruskin canon.
Burd’s first Ruskin edition, The Winnington Letters of John Ruskin (1969), was the result, and it was instrumental in initiating a Ruskin revival. In the same year, the scholar James Dearden, with whom Burd would form an enduring friendship, organized a Ruskin conference at Brantwood, the master’s house on the shores of Coniston Water, Cumbria, and were thus brought into contact with a new generation of scholars.
Burd’s next edition was the two-volume Ruskin Family Letters (1973), an intimate record of Ruskin’s formative years. It assembles and annotates the family’s correspondence from the early years of his parents’ long engagement to the launch of Ruskin’s first book, Modern Painters, in 1843.
His next subject was Rose La Touche, the young woman to whom Ruskin proposed marriage when she was 18 and he 47. John Ruskin and Rose La Touche (1979) is an edition of Rose’s diary. It provided a new understanding of her character and brought out the depth of Ruskin’s love for her, so often stereotyped and misunderstood.
Burd next turned to editing a previously unpublished set of Ruskin’s letters written in Venice in the winter of 1876-77, soon after Rose’s death at the age of 25. Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876-77, appeared in 1990.
Burd was born in Miami, Florida, one of three children, and the only son of Melvin, a building contractor, and his wife Elizabeth (nee Van Akin). At the University of Chicago, he developed a love for the work of Turner and the pre-Raphaelite painters. After leaving, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years. He met Julia Robinson, a teacher, and they married in 1943. He then enlisted in the US navy, and was a member of the force that invaded, and later rebuilt, Okinawa, Japan.
On shore assignment during his naval service, he read Proust, and it was the latter’s interest in art, architecture and Venice in particular that led Burd to the novelist’s passion for Ruskin. As a frequent visitor to the UK, he became a companion of the Guild of St George, the utopian charity founded by Ruskin in 1871. His energy was prodigious and at least two of his visits, in the company of his friend the Ruskin scholar James L. Spates, were made during his 90s. In that decade he published six new papers on Ruskin, the last in his 100th year.
Melvin Van Akin Burd, literary scholar, born 19 April 1914; died 7 November 2015.