The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place by John Dixon Hunt (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place by John Dixon Hunt Christiana Payne (bio) The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, by John Dixon Hunt; pp. 286. London: Reaktion Books, 2020, $50.00, $50.00 paper, $50.00 ebook. John Ruskin drew constantly and compulsively throughout his life, only ceasing to do so after his final mental collapse in 1889. Several thousand of his drawings survive, covering the vast range of his interests. The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place sets out to consider him as a topographer, responding to the spirit of a place—its genius loci. Familiar from the history of landscape gardening, this term can be appropriately applied to Ruskin's drawings, both because he was very much aware of the way geology, climate, and historical events shaped places, but also because the places he drew aroused his own deep emotions. Some of his favorite locations, such as Chamonix, were associated with happy travels in his youth with his parents; others, such as Abbeville and Venice, mingled pain and pleasure. They gave him pleasure in the achievements of the Gothic and early Renaissance builders and craftsmen, pain in the knowledge of the decay wrought by neglect and ill-judged renovation. Other landscapes, such as mountain peaks and passes, induced a melancholy born of the knowledge of the human tragedies they so often witnessed. John Dixon Hunt, Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania, is well placed to write on this topic. He has had a long and distinguished career as an authority on English literature and garden design. His biography of Ruskin, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin, was published in 1982 (the dust jacket erroneously dates it to 1992), and in 1985 he founded the academic journal Word & Image (1985–present), which focuses on the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In this book he sets out to show that Ruskin's drawings should be considered not merely illustrative of what he wrote, but as the evidence of practices that shaped his way of thinking and writing. They represent "one means of access to his astonishing imagination" (11). The chapters cover the relationship between drawing and writing in Ruskin's work, his idea of the picturesque, his education as a draughtsman, and his own teaching of drawing. There are separate chapters on Venice and on two of Ruskin's major concerns in landscape: geology and water, the latter including clouds and climate change. Hunt [End Page 331] emphasizes the importance of Ruskin's early experiences. On travels with his parents, he was encouraged to record his impressions both verbally and visually, leading to a constant interplay in his work between writing and drawing. In 1829, when he was ten, his father gave him a set of fifty minerals of the Lake District, beginning his lifelong interest in geology. For his thirteenth birthday, his father's business partner gave him Samuel Rogers's Italy, a Poem (1822), with its images and words side by side, the images being vignettes by J. M. W. Turner, another source of a lifelong passion. Hunt draws on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's idea of the primary and secondary imaginations to explain Ruskin's way of seeing the world. The primary imagination "consists in an ability to look well and carefully at things," which allowed Ruskin to "draw or explain straightforwardly what he observed" (26). The secondary imagination recreates something new. As Hunt observes, "it was qualities of mystery, effect and beauty that Ruskin sought in places" (63). Many of his best landscape drawings achieve this. Their fragmentary nature—seen as a disadvantage on the rare occasions when he exhibited his work—adds to their evocative power. There was a tension in Ruskin's work between science and emotion, and between his adulation of Turner and his self-appointed role as prophet of Pre-Raphaelitism. The example of John Brett's Val d'Aosta (1858) shows that Ruskin might fail to recognize how other artists had grasped the genius loci of a place, even when their works depicted the qualities he had picked out in...