#john ruskin
“The Rise of Everyday Design: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and America”
February 9–July 14, 2019 https://hrc.utexas.edu
See more than 200 items including books, drawings, furniture, decorative arts objects, photographs, and flyers, broadsides and advertising ephemera that offer a new and detailed look at the history of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts movement occupied a central place in discussions about modern life in Britain and America from the late 1840s to the early 1920s and beyond.
Arts and Crafts reformers were concerned with the daily realities of the industrial age, and used design to envision and promote a new and improved way of living. Discover how theorists and makers—like John Ruskin and William Morris (along with lesser known figures like Lucy Crane) in Britain and Candace Wheeler, Alice and Elbert Hubbard, and Gustav Stickley in America—spread their ideas through books, retail showrooms, and world’s fairs, and how Arts and Crafts objects, which were originally handmade and costly, came to be manufactured and sold to the everyday consumer. Items on display from the Ransom Center’s collections will include hand-drawn designs and sketches by Ruskin and Morris, a first edition copy of Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, books and marketing materials of the Kelmscott and Roycroft presses, stained glass designs by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, and plates from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio.
These items will be paired with photographs, furniture, and decorative arts objects from the University’s Alexander Architectural Archives, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and private collections. Opening on the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth, the exhibition will show how the Arts and Crafts idea made its way into everyday homes, transforming the lives of ordinary people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and remaining influential to this day.
A companion volume, edited by exhibition curators Monica Penick and Christopher Long and published by Yale University Press in association with the Ransom Center, offers a new understanding of the Arts and Crafts idea, its geographical reach, and its translation into everyday taste.
Happy 200th birthday, John Ruskin! Born on February 8, 1819, Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draftsman, watercolorist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. Our library has vellum-bound editions of Modern PaintersandThe Stones of Venice, circa 1886-88. Ask a librarian to see anything in our special collections!
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James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875, oil on panel.
The famous art critic and champion of the pre raphaelite movement once famously said about this painting, that it was like ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. Consequentially they faced a libel case which Whistler won after claiming that Ruskin had damaged his reputation.
This painting has risen above this important defining moment in art history to become a masterpiece in its own right. It shows immense musicality and expressiveness capturing the spontaneity of the nightly firework display over Cremore Gardens.
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Both artist and art critic, John Ruskin was acknowledged as one of the 19th century’s greatest geniuses; but towards the end of his career, his work fell into obscurity. A conference at The Huntington this weekend makes the case for his enduring relevance and importance.
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John Ruskin, Perspective Studies of Paper Crowns,1870.
Ruskin Collection.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
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John Ruskin, Perspective Studies of Paper Crowns,1870.
Ruskin Collection.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
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