The Ruskin Art Club has received a very special invitation to join the Fellows of the Fogg Museum at Harvard University on a ZOOM event, a lecture by Dr. Marjorie Cohn about Ruskin and the beginnings of the museum and the teaching of art history as a result of the friendship of John Ruskin and Harvard President Charles Eliot Norton.
In this lively, illustrated talk, Jerry Cohn will discuss the beginning of art history instruction at Harvard in 1874—the first such curriculum in the United States—and the key figures on both sides of the Atlantic who were central to its origins. On the American side were Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard's first professor of fine arts (art history), and Charles Herbert Moore, the first teacher of Harvard’s Fine Arts 1, a free-hand drawing course required for fine arts concentrators. Their work was directly patterned on that of John Ruskin, the British author, art critic, and cultural hero who began teaching art history at Oxford in 1870. Ruskin assembled drawings, photographs, and prints as teaching examples, and taught drawing, not to train incipient artists but to encourage visual understanding. Previously, Oxford and Harvard had only taught by means of words (languages, literature, history) and numbers (the sciences). Harvard sent Moore to Europe in 1877 to gather art examples and learn directly from Ruskin; Ruskin and Norton had met previously and grown close, and their intertwined personal lives had much to do with the story. While all of this happened before Harvard had an art museum, the talk will also touch on art collecting in the twentieth century—in particular, the donations and bequests to Harvard of Norton’s and Moore’s pupils John Loeb, Edward Waldo Forbes, and Grenville L. Winthrop.
Elizabeth Rudy, current Curator of Prints, will introduce the program.