The Elements of Drawing

A brief history of the Ruskin Teaching Collections

Contents

• Ruskin at Oxford
• Ruskin’s drawing classes
• The Ruskin Teaching Collection
• Table
• Notes
• Bibliography

Ruskin at Oxford

John Ruskin’s involvement with Oxford dates back to his youth when, aged 18, he went up to Christ Church as a Gentleman Commoner in January 1837. He graduated five years later (having withdrawn for over a year due to illness) with an Honourary 4th in Classics & Mathematics in April 1842. Clearly, his Oxford education meant something to him: the first volume of Modern Painters, the work that was to make his name, was published the following year, its author identified only as ‘A Graduate of Oxford’.

Ruskin continued to be involved with the University: his friend Henry Acland – who had been a commoner with Ruskin and who had taken up a readership in anatomy at Christ Church – enlisted Ruskin’s help in his campaign for a new museum to house University’s collections of scientific specimens. Once the new, neo-Gothic University Museum had been approved, Ruskin contributed to the building funds, suggested decorative ideas, occasionally supervised the masons in the architect’s absence, and is even alleged to have tried building work himself. Following the appointment of another friend, Henry Liddell (who had been a tutor when Ruskin was an undergraduate) as Dean of Christ Church in 1855, Ruskin was amongst the first to be elected to the new position of Honorary Student there. And, in 1861, Ruskin presented 48 Turner drawings and 12 pages from a Turner sketch-book, with an estimated value of £2,000, to the University Galleries.

However, it was the death of Felix Slade in 1868 that opened the way for Ruskin to come to Oxford in a formal role. Slade left his extensive collections to the nation, together with £35,000 to found chairs of fine art at Oxford, Cambridge and University College London. The Oxford appointment committee included, ex officio, the Curators of the University Galleries who, by then, included both Acland and Liddell – and so, in 1869, Ruskin was elected the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.

Ruskin took his duties seriously: he gave an inaugural lecture on 8 February 1870, the first of eleven courses that he would deliver at Oxford. He was one of the University’s star attractions, often having to give the same lecture twice, once for the University and once for the town; his performances were, by all accounts, charismatic and striking, involving the extensive use of visual aids and large-scale lecture diagrams.

During the course of his professorship, Ruskin was increasingly distracted by his relationship with Rose La Touche, his commitments to other organisations such as his Guild of St George, and his increasingly frequent and severe illnesses. However, his appointment was renewed twice, once in 1873 and again in 1875, and it was only following a major breakdown in 1878, and the unsuccessful outcome of Whistler’s famous libel case against him (won by Whistler, although with derisory damages of just one farthing - ¼ d.), that he eventually resigned. Even after his resignation, though, Ruskin continued to be involved with the University, negotiating the loan of a substantial body of Turner drawings from the National Gallery to the University Galleries in 1879.

In October 1883, Ruskin again took up the Professorship, his successor having resigned to make way for him. However, the second professorship was an unhappy affair, and Ruskin felt that the University was increasingly unwilling to help him fulfill his ambitions for the courses he taught at Oxford. They declined his request that they purchase two Turner drawings for his Drawing School, and they also refused to provide the land for new premises for the School, despite Ruskin’s offer to meet the building costs. Consequently, in June 1884 Ruskin revoked his bequest of books, several Turners and a portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti which he believed to be by Titian to the University. But the most significant source of conflict between Ruskin and the University was vivisection, which crystallised around the construction of a laboratory for Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology and the holder of a vivisection licence. Ruskin, a staunch anti-vivisectionist, resigned his professorship twelve days after the vivisectionists won a major debate in Convocation; he wrote to his cousin that day that ‘I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat – nor address myself to the men who have been – there’s no word for it.’(1)

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Ruskin’s drawing classes

From early on in his first term as Slade Professor, Ruskin taught drawing as well as lecturing on art. He began with informal classes in the Michaelmas Term of 1870, but was thinking of formalising his teaching by 14 March 1871, when he wrote to Acland that

I want the room now occupied by the town classes for a grammar-school of Art. I wish to make it thoroughly interesting even to very young children, to fill it with prints by great masters for the general public, and with cases containing books, seals, casts of coins, etc., properly catalogued and illustrated, and to conduct the teaching there, with the assistance of Mr. Macdonald, on a system designed primarily for the sons and daughters of gentlemen, though, I hope, not likely to be unprofitable even to (whatever we mean by the term) artisans and their children, but absolutely distinct from that adopted by the authorities at Kensington for the promotion of mechanical, and therefore vile, manufacture. (2)

Ruskin, always generous, offered to fund the new school himself.

But first, something had to be done about the existing drawing school in the University Museum. This was the Oxford School of Science and Art, which since 1867 had occupied the south end of the Museum’s west gallery (what is now the Ashmolean Museum’s shop). Supported by Acland and Liddell (both of whose daughters studied there), it was run according to the lines laid down nationally by the Department of Science and Art, intended to improve the standards of industrial design in the U.K., under the direction of Henry Cole. The so-called ‘South Kensington System’ – named from the Department’s location in South Kensington – was national, uniform and mechanical, intended for working designers or ‘artisans’, who were taught in the evening. Less rigid classes were held during the day, for ladies and gentlemen, who followed a less rigid syllabus. Both courses were taught by the School’s Master, Alexander Macdonald.

Ruskin had taken exception to the School, arguing that it was not the University’s job to teach artisans. In the same letter to Acland of 14 March 1871, he laid out his opposition:

the men whom I myself should call ‘artists’ by profession – namely, potters, weavers, metal and glass workers, sculptors, and painters – can none of them be taught their businesses (nor any portion of their businesses as a definite craft) in the University Galleries as now built, nor do I think that the teaching of those businesses is any part of the function of the University. On the other hand, the grammar of all the arts may be taught to young persons residing in Oxford or its neighbourhood, and the Galleries may be so arranged as to form an instructive and pleasant museum of art for persons of all ages. (3)

Eventually, a solution was found. Ruskin agreed to establish and fund the Ruskin Drawing Mastership, taking Macdonald on as the Master after he resigned from the Oxford School. Under a formal agreement with the Curators of the University Galleries dated 18 May 1871, Ruskin gave £5,000 to fund the Mastership and Macdonald was paid £150 a year from the interest. The new School took over the space previously occupied by the Oxford School, together with the Turner Room and adjoining ‘Professor’s Room’ above. The Town and University (or Professor’s) Classes were scheduled to open in October 1871. But even after Ruskin’s classes were formally instituted, the Oxford School continued to run as an ‘Industrial Class’ under Macdonald, in the basement below the central wing of the University Galleries, which it was permitted to use rent free.

In fact, Ruskin’s aims in teaching drawing were somewhat unusual. He was adamant that he did not intend to train ‘artists’. This was evident even when he was teaching at the Working Men’s College, 1854-8 and 1860, when, according to one pupil,

Mr Ruskin, upon several occasions, when speaking at College meetings, said that men came into his class with an idea that they would become artists and earn more money than they would as workmen. His wish was to teach men drawing in order that they might see greater beauties than they had hitherto seen in nature and in art, and thereby gain more pleasure in life; if they had the artistic gift it would ultimately display itself. (4)

Ruskin himself put this more succinctly in a memorandum to his colleague at the College, Lowes Dickinson, in 1859: ‘They are taught drawing, primarily in order to direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe.’ (5) Or, more briefly still: ‘I am only trying to teach you to see.’ (6) For Ruskin, seeing properly brought true understanding – particularly of nature. And, believing that the teaching of art ‘is the teaching of all things’, (7) Ruskin intended that his students, in following his course in drawing, would also receive an education in the history of art, in natural history, and so on.

Ruskin seems to have intended that his classes would fall somewhere between the teaching of drawing as an ‘accomplishment’ (valuing dexterity rather than precision) and the teaching of drawing for industrial design (which he saw as soulless, and embodied in the South Kensington System). Thus, he wrote in his inaugural series of lectures that

I conceive it to be the function of this Professorship ... to establish both a practical and critical school of fine art for English gentlemen: practical, so that, if they draw at all, they may draw rightly; and critical so that, being first directed to such works of existing art as will best reward their study, they may afterwards make their patronage of living artists delightful to themselves in their consciousness of its justice ... (8)

Consequently, the drawing courses had some peculiar omissions. To begin with, Ruskin had little interest in the human figure, and was opposed to the study of anatomy for art. So, there was no figure drawing in his courses. He considered painting in oils – for which he seems to have had little inclination – inappropriate to a course aimed at students of literature). And he had no time for imaginative composition, writing to Macdonald in 1872 that

You may give any of the students who wish to show me their power, whatever natural object you think proper to paint, provided there be no attempt at composition or picture making. (9)

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The Ruskin Teaching Collection

Ruskin seems to have been considering the idea of an exemplary collection of works of art since at least as early as 1854, when he wrote to Pauline Trevelyan:

And I mean to lend out Liber Studiorum & Albert Durers to everybody who wants them; and to make copies of all fine 13th century manuscripts, and lend them out – all for nothing, of course, – and have a room where anybody can go in all day and always see nothing in it but what is good. (10)

So, one of his earliest proposals as Slade Professor – made almost a year before he proposed formally establishing his drawing classes – was that additional pictures be housed in the room where his earlier gift of Turners was held, as examples for his students. He proposed

two other sets of drawings to be deposited in the division of the Gallery called the Raffaele Gallery, consisting (a) of Standards, which are never to be removed from the room in which they are placed: all 30' by 21' in cases – to be 100 of architecture; 100 of painting and sculpture – numbered and catalogued – (b) copies for practice – about 50 in number – also numbered and catalogued – in flat oak frames 20½ by 14½ – These also are never to leave the rooms. These are especially for the use of the Professor’s class. (11)

Ruskin began assembling the works that were to become his Teaching Collection around Easter 1870. He divided them between general examples, and works intended specifically for teaching drawing. The former developed into the ‘Standard Series’, later extended to include an additional ‘Reference Series’; the latter were divided between the ‘Educational Series’, which Ruskin used for his ‘Professor’s Class’, and the Rudimentary Series, intended for Macdonald’s ‘Town Class’. The Standard Series and first part of the Educational Series were catalogued in 1870, before the formal drawing classes began. (12) Although Ruskin’s first major illness over the summer of 1871, and the illness and subsequent death of his mother the following autumn and winter, slowed work on the Collection, the catalogue of the Educational Series was revised in 1871, (13) and the Rudimentary Series was first catalogued in April 1872, but revised throughout year. (14)

The Collection’s status was only properly established in 1875, however, when Ruskin signed a Deed of Gift on 31 May 1875, which gave the Ruskin Art Collection to the University, formalised Ruskin’s 1861 Turner gift and formalised his £5,000 endowment for the Drawing Mastership. At this point, the scope of the Collection was defined by the existing published catalogues of the four series. (15) However, a few years later Ruskin began a major reorganisation of the Collection, dictating revised catalogue entries to the Principal of St Mary Hall, Dr D.P. Chase, in 1878 – although these were never published during his lifetime. (16) Consequently, the order in which the Collection was supposed to be arranged became rather unclear and, as Tim Hilton has written, ‘since only Ruskin could understand the purpose of his collections, or the principles of his instruction in drawing, it was likely that confusions and friction would follow.’ (17)

Given the vagaries of the Collection’s organisation, and Ruskin’s continual alterations to his catalogues (Cook and Wedderburn list twelve different texts), (18) it is perhaps unsurprising that its true extent is not easy to gauge. However, having collated the majority of the printed and manuscript catalogues (three editions of the Rudimentary Series catalogue remain untraceable) with the posthumous catalogue created by Cook and Wedderburn in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works, about 1,470 items can be identified as belonging, or having once belonged, to the collections. As shown in table 1, the vast majority of works were drawings or watercolours. Over a third of these – about 335 – were by Ruskin himself, either studies after nature, depictions of buildings, or copies of or details from other works of art. Many were by Ruskin’s assistants or his proteges, of similar subjects. Unsurprisingly, there are also a significant number of Turner drawings – 28 – and one or two by old masters. The next most significant category is prints, including a decent collection of 24 Dürer engravings and woodcuts, and over 50 plates from Turner’s Liber studiorum (several in multiple impressions). However, the majority of the prints in collection were removed from illustrated books, such as Le Vaillant’s Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux de Paradis ... (Paris, 1806) or Lenormant and de Witte’s Élite des monuments céramographiques ... (Paris, 1844-1861). The photographs are nearly all either reproductions of works of art, or views of buildings; the vast majority are albumen prints, of a variety of sizes. Manuscript illuminations include, most strikingly, the thirteenth-century Psalter and Hours of Isabelle of France, which Ruskin carefully dismembered and his heirs equally carefully reassembled before selling it to Henry Yates Thompson, from whom it passed to the Fitzwilliam Museum. (19) There were a few casts from the Scaliger tombs in Verona and some electrotypes of Greek coins; the one painting was a study by Tintoretto for his picture of Doge Alvise Mocenigo praying, and is now at Ruskin’s house at Brantwood in the Lake District.

The works were largely arranged in wooden cabinets, based upon those which Ruskin had designed to hold the Turner drawings he gave to the University Galleries in 1861. The objects were mounted in window mounts (usually held in place with sealing wax or stamp edges), then placed in a glazed frame, and each frame then slid into its own slot in the cabinet. This kept the collection in order (each frame was carefully labelled with its allotted number), as well as protecting the objects from the depredations of light and atmospheric pollution. But the cabinets took up a great deal of space, and so they were dispersed by the Ruskin School in the early 1970s, and are now divided between the Ruskin Foundation at Lancaster and Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

However, the cabinets give a misleading impression of the Collection’s stability. As already mentioned, Ruskin was prone to rearrange the collection – most notably in 1878 – and he also tended to circulate objects between the Oxford Collection, and those he had assembled for the Guild of St George in Sheffield and Whitelands College in Chelsea, as well as adding his own material to the central body of works defined in the 1875 Deed of Gift. Thus, following his final resignation from the Slade Professorship in 1885, the collection was badly disorganised. Matters were exacerbated by Ruskin’s ill-feeling towards the University at that point. From January 1886, he began trying to recover non-Collection items from the Drawing School, and we know that on 11 March 1887, 99 drawings were removed by Ruskin’s framers at his request; frustratingly, we do not know what those 99 drawings were. That year, Ruskin also instructed Macdonald to return the sequence in the cabinets to that in the printed catalogues – which Macdonald did, as much as was possible given the changes which had been made to the Collection’s composition by then. In fact, the University never seems to have been sure of what it actually owned. Ruskin’s death in 1900 provided an impetus to establish exactly who owned what, and an investigation was carried out by T.W. Jackson, a Curator of the University Galleries and Trustee of the Drawing School, in 1901. He concluded that

Through the years 1875-1878 Mr Ruskin appears to have rearranged and changed the contents of the cabinets very freely. He removed many objects that were scheduled, often replacing them by examples of greater value: and sometimes he filled up blank spaces. He made these changes himself, with the help of his servant or assistant Crawley – and Mr Macdonald, who was busy with other work of the school, found he could not follow the course of the changes made. (20)

 In the end, the first unified catalogue of the whole collection was compiled by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn as volume 21 of the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works, published in 1906. (21) Although it reflects the state of the Collection in 1906 – and notes many of the pieces which could not be found even then – it is a difficult catalogue to use, as it is basically an annotated version of Ruskin’s published catalogues, with the addition of some manuscript material and some rather cursory notes on material within the collection which had never found its way into Ruskin’s catalogues.

The twentieth century saw a series of rationalisations and reorganisations of collections held by the University of Oxford. As part of this process, care of the Ruskin Teaching Collection was transferred from the Ruskin School to the Ashmolean Museum (which had incorporated the University Galleries in 1908) around 1949 – a move which involved no change in location, as the Drawing School still occupied rooms within the Ashmolean. As mentioned above, restricted space led to the disposal of the cabinets which housed the collection in 1971. The most significant items in the Collection were incorporated into the main run of the Ashmolean’s prints and drawings, whilst the less important objects were bound into a series of large blue volumes in 1983. The collection continues to be accessible as part of the Ashmolean’s collection of prints and drawings, and can be consulted in the Museum’s Print Room.

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Table

Table 1: The composition of the Ruskin Teaching Collection [back to text]

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Notes

This account is drawn from Robert Hewison ed., The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford: Catalogue of the Rudimentary Series, in the arrangement of 1873, with Ruskin’s comments of 1878, London (Lion and Unicorn Press): 1984, pp. 9-35, and Robert Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford: The Art of Education, Oxford (Clarendon Press): 1996, pp. 1-46.

1. Ruskin to Joan Severn, 22 March 1885: Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 42. [back to text]
2. Ruskin to Acland, 14 March 1871: John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin: Library Edition, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, London (George Allen): 1903-12, 21:xx. [back to text]
3. Ruskin to Acland, 14 March 1871: Works, 21:xx. [back to text]
4. Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, pp. 7-8. [back to text]
5. Works, 16:471. [back to text]
6. Ruskin, to the students of the Working Men’s College, between 1854 and 1860: Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 33. [back to text]
7. Works, 29:86. [back to text]
8. Ruskin, inaugural Lectures on Art, 1870: Works, 20:27. [back to text]
9. Ruskin to Macdonald, 4 May 1872: Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 37. [back to text]
10. Ruskin to Pauline Trevelyan, 1854: Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, 2 vols, New Haven & London (Yale University Press): 1985-90, I, pp. 202-3. [back to text]
11. Ruskin to the Curators of the University Galleries, 17 March 1870: Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 19. [back to text]
12. John Ruskin, Catalogue of Examples Arranged for Elementary Study in the University Galleries, Oxford (Clarendon Press): 1870. [back to text]
13. John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Educational Series, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): 1871. [back to text]
14. John Ruskin, Instructions in Elementary Drawing, s.n.: [1872]; John Ruskin, Instructions in Practice of Elementary Drawing, Arranged with Reference to the First Series of Examples in the Drawing Schools of the University of Oxford, s.n.: [1872]; John Ruskin, Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises arranged for the Lower Drawing-School, Oxford, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): 1872; John Ruskin, Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises arranged for the Lower Drawing-School, Oxford, London (Spottiswoode & Co.): 1873. [back to text]
15. John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Reference Series including temporarily the First Section of the Standard Series, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): [1872]; John Ruskin, Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises arranged for the Lower Drawing-School, Oxford, London (Spottiswoode & Co.): 1873; John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Educational Series, London (Spottiswoode & Co.): 1874. [back to text]
16. Oxford University Archives: RS 13/2, John Ruskin, ‘Educational Series 1878’; RS 13/3, John Ruskin, ‘Rudimentary Series 1878’. [back to text]
17. Hilton, Ruskin, II, p. 305. [back to text]
18. Works, 21:5-6, 55, 145, 161-2, 265. [back to text]
19. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 300. [back to text]
20. Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford, p. 28. [back to text]
21. John Ruskin, The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford: Catalogues, Notes and Instructions, London (George Allen): 1906. (Works, 21.) [back to text]

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Bibliography

Robert Hewison ed., The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford: Catalogue of the Rudimentary Series, in the arrangement of 1873, with Ruskin’s comments of 1878, London (Lion and Unicorn Press): 1984.

Robert Hewison, Ruskin at Oxford: The Art of Education, Oxford (Clarendon Press): 1996.

Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, 2 vols, New Haven & London (Yale University Press): 1985-90.

John Ruskin, Catalogue of Examples Arranged for Elementary Study in the University Galleries, Oxford (Clarendon Press): 1870.

John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Educational Series, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): 1871.

John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Reference Series including temporarily the First Section of the Standard Series, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): [1872].

John Ruskin, Instructions in Elementary Drawing, s.n.: [1872].

John Ruskin, Instructions in Practice of Elementary Drawing, Arranged with Reference to the First Series of Examples in the Drawing Schools of the University of Oxford, s.n.: [1872].

John Ruskin, Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises arranged for the Lower Drawing-School, Oxford, London (Smith, Elder & Co.): 1872.

John Ruskin, Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises arranged for the Lower Drawing-School, Oxford, London (Spottiswoode & Co.): 1873.

John Ruskin, Catalogue of the Educational Series, London (Spottiswoode & Co.): 1874.

John Ruskin, ‘Educational Series 1878’, Oxford University Archives: RS 13/2.

John Ruskin, ‘Rudimentary Series 1878’, Oxford University Archives: RS 13/3.

John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin: Library Edition, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, London (George Allen): 1903-12.

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