As the 203rd anniversary of Ruskin’s birth comes upon us, it seems natural to wonder what Ruskin was really like. We might wish to ask how we would have felt had we met him ourselves? Stuart Eagles explores what Oxford students thought of Ruskin by looking at some...

In my first Ruskin Research Blog of 2022, I look back on a set of proposals made a hundred years ago. Inspired by Ruskin, the plan, conceived in Sheffield, appears to have escaped the attention of Ruskin scholars until now. Although the scheme came to nought in the...

As many of us around the globe find ourselves trying, for a second year running, to meet the challenge of Covid as we prepare for Christmas, let’s look back to a delightful episode in the life of John Ruskin. A RUSKINIAN CHRISTMAS To Dr Kay Walter, Dedicated Teacher,...

Among the earliest Companions of Ruskin’s Guild of St George were two eminent citizens of Scotland’s “granite city”. James Walker will form part of the story that follows, but this blog will focus on his friend, THE RUSKINIAN BUILDER: JOHN MORGAN OF ABERDEEN John...

I have lost a friend, and the world has lost the grandpa of modern Ruskin Studies. Shortly before Jim’s death, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, several of us were fortunate to be given the chance to voice our sense of indebtedness to a man remarkable for his...

Among the numerous treasures Ruskin acquired for himself and the public in the course of his long life, from books to botanical specimens, shells to stones, and manuscripts to minerals, his horde of coins is one of the least well-known and appreciated of his...

In the first of a new series of occasional blogs exploring Ruskin’s global reach, I focus on how Ruskin was celebrated as an Apostle of Beauty calling on Europe to reject modern industrial capitalism and return to nature. A brief look at two Czech readers of Ruskin...

To Dr Sara Atwood, Scholar, Teacher, and Dear Friend. Early in 1885 John Ruskin’s utopian society, the Guild of St George, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, issued a Master’s Report. In an account appended by senior trustee, George Baker (1825-1910),...

This is a year of Ruskinian anniversaries. Two of them—the 150th anniversary of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George, and the centenary of the death of the pioneering Yorkshire businessman, George Thomson—have prompted me to write, and the Guild to publish, a new...

It is one of the unaccountable facts of Ruskin scholarship that many of John Ruskin’s keenest admirers have barely registered in the histories of his influence. A notable example is Stephen Rowland (1841-1940) (pictured below), an early and long-serving Companion of...