The Ruskin’s Painting Materials project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is a pioneering four-year study focused on examining the Industrial Revolution's impact on 19th-century artists and their material choices. The project aims to systematically examine and identify watercolour pigments employed in artworks selected for educational purposes by the renowned writer, artist, art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin, for his School of Art, founded in 1871 in Oxford. The collection comprises watercolours, drawings, prints, and photographs of artworks, architecture, and natural history, created by Ruskin himself and commissioned from his contemporaries, including J.M.W. Turner, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Henry Hunt. Ruskin curated this collection specifically for his students to copy, aiming to help them master techniques of outline, shading, and colour. These works were intended by Ruskin to exemplify the "Elements of Drawing".
The artworks in the teaching collection span a critical period in 19th century art history marked by the rising popularity of industrially manufactured synthetic colours. While many artists embraced the inspiring potential of these new colours, they were often unaware of the unverified manufacturing processes, meaning pigments were subject to adulteration, substitution, and varied significantly in composition, ultimately compromising the quality and permanence. The identification of newly introduced pigments within the collection offers a unique opportunity to assess the adoption rate of these formulations by this distinct group of 19th-century artists. These compositional insights can be compared with known pigment formulations and historical data to further investigate instances of substitution and adulteration. Detecting "fugitive colours" in the Ruskin teaching collection provides crucial information relating to the material choices of specific artists, and enables conservators to make informed preservation decisions for this cultural heritage collection and related works. Therefore, this project highlights the challenges associated with the adoption of new materials in 19th-century art and the implications for long-term conservation.
Using the latest advanced non-destructive analytical techniques this study aims to identify, map and evaluate chemical composition at elemental and molecular level using MA-XRF and XRD; document and measure 3D surface topography features using 3D digital microscopy and RTI, and identify sub-features such as underdrawings using IRR. This comprehensive analysis examines the works of artists who were not only handpicked by Ruskin, but who were likely influenced by his resolute artistic doctrine. It addresses the challenges of interpreting and identifying individual pigments in works using mixed or layered colours, such as William Henry Hunt's "colour over colour" technique which employed stippling pure pigments over zinc white gouache to achieve hyper-realism. This study also investigates the provenance of pigments used by Charles Fairfax Murray, Ruskin's employed copyist, who replicated works by Italian Masters. One notable example being a copy of Botticelli’s 'Lorenzo Tornabuoni presented to the Liberal Arts', which was undertaken shortly before the original was relocated to Paris, with the copy being displayed openly in the teaching school at Oxford.
