This is part two in a series of three lectures of the Ruskin Art Club’s ongoing series of presentations on Ruskin in America.
Thoreau saw few paintings in his life, yet his writings are full of passages that show the trained eye of an artist. From the scientist Louis Agassiz, Thoreau learned how to develop the bond between the drawing hand and the seeing eye; from the artist William Gilpin, he learned to frame his seeing in terms of the “picturesque”; but from John Ruskin, Thoreau learned to see beyond the frame, to perceive form, light, and above all color. Late in 1857, Thoreau immersed himself in Ruskin’s writings, and although he criticized Ruskin’s orientation to art rather than nature, he infused his late writings with Ruskinian ways of seeing, including painterly studies of color and the role of imagination in sustaining reality. In his brilliant essay “Autumnal Tints” (which includes a Ruskinian drawing), Thoreau shows how nature paints with light, how “he who shoots at beauty” must know its seasons and haunts and the color of its wing; “it must be in your eye when you go forth.” Ruskin helped Thoreau catch beauty on the wing, and he lived ever after haunted by its glance.
Laura Dassow-Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and the history of ecological thought. She is the author of numerous essays on Thoreau, Emerson, Humboldt, and related figures; her book Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago 2017) received the Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Her other books include The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (2009), Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (2003), and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995). She is currently at work on a literary biography of the contemporary American author Barry Lopez, and on Children of the Fire, a group biography of the American Transcendentalists.