Two sessions exploring Modern Painters:
Thursday, November 3rd, 5pm PDT.
Thursday, November 10th, 5pm PST.
Session 1: Nov 3rd
In this session we will discuss passages from the first volume of Modern Painters, published under a pseudonym (“By a Graduate of Oxford”) in 1843 when Ruskin was just twenty-four years old. Conceived as a defense of J.M.W. Turner, whose late work had come under critical attack, the book evolved into a sophisticated study of contemporary art. Ruskin’s breadth of knowledge, attention to detail, and authoritative voice quickly won him a readership and, once his identity became known, established him as an important new figure in art criticism. We will read an excerpt on ‘Turner’s Waterfalls’ and two short chapters: “Of Ideas of Imitation” and “Of Ideas of Beauty.” We will read closely, paying equal attention to both meaning and craft (language, themes, rhetorical strategies). What ideas does Ruskin present in these extracts and how does he do it? Why did this work by a young, unknown writer make such an impression? How does Modern Painters continue to enrich our perception and sharpen our vision?
Session 2: Nov 10th
In this session we will discuss the ways in which the perspective and tone of Modern Painters evolved over the course of five volumes and seventeen years. We will read two selections from Modern Painters 5, the final volume of the series, considering not only the changing nature of Ruskin’s thinking, but the development of his style and the changing character of the Modern Painters project. Published in 1860, this volume shares a broad, allusive perspective with other works Ruskin produced during this period, as he began to foreground the social criticism that had underpinned his work from the start. Modern Painters 5 is a multi-layered text rich in ideas about art, society, the natural world, mythology, and language. It is a composite text, a blend of word and image in which Ruskin’s carefully designed plates interact with and enrich his argument. Although Modern Painters 1 and 5 are different in many ways (as each successive volume is different in some way from the last) they are yet clearly parts of a whole in which each volume is a brick in a complete edifice, interdependent and necessary. As Ruskin himself said of the organic, inevitable development of the completed series: “it has been written of necessity. I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy it. I heard falsehood taught, and was compelled to deny it. Nothing else was possible to me. I knew not how little or how much might come of the business, or whether I was fit for it; but here was the lie full set in front of me, and there was no way round it, but only over it. So that, as the work changed like a tree, it was also rooted like a tree—not where it would, but where need was.”
Sara Atwood’s book, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, was published by Ashgate in 2011. Further publications include contributions to the Yale University Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2017), John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education (Anthem Press 2018), William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel (University of Exeter Press 2019) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Palgrave 2019). She has lectured widely on Ruskin, both in the US and abroad, focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. She delivered the 17th Annual Ruskin Lecture co-sponsored by the Ruskin Art Club and the Doheny Libraries (USC) in September 2017 on “Valuing Education in a Market Society.” In February 2019, during Ruskin’s bicentenary year, she gave a lecture at the Houghton Library, Harvard University to mark the opening of the library’s exhibition Victorian Visionary: John Ruskin and the Realization of the Ideal; she also presented at the bicentenary conference John Ruskin: 19th-Century Visionary, 21st-Century Inspiration at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. She is co-director of the Ruskin Society of North America, a Companion of the Guild, a board member of the Ruskin Art Club and a lecturer in English literature and writing at Portland State University.
Materials for Events
November 3rd, 2021
Links to the materials for study:
November 10th, 2021
Links to the materials for study:
Optional Reading:
"Imitation and Imagination: Ruskin,. Plato, and Aesthetics" by Sara Atwood (2011)
"The Earth-Veil": Ruskin and Environment by Sara Atwood (2015)