A complex and often contradictory figure, John Ruskin stands as one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century. A pioneering art critic and an accomplished draftsman, he believed that art had the power to transform society and that nature inspired the most meaningful art. Two centuries after his birth, this exhibition, featuring works by J. M. W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones and other leading artists of the nineteenth century, examines Ruskin’s legacy as a social reformer, ecological thinker, and educator.

Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin features paintings, drawings, and manuscripts largely from collections at Yale University – the Yale Center for British Art and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – together representing one of the most important repositories of Ruskin’s work in the United States, much of which is to be exhibited in the UK for the first time.

The exhibition has been curated by three PhD Candidates in Yale University’s Department of the History of Art: Tara Contractor, Victoria Hepburn, and Judith Stapleton; with Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Centre Professor of the History of Art at Yale; and Courtney Skipton Long, Acting Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art.

4.15pm

Dr Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (Associate Professor of British History, University of Chicago) explores fossil fuels, economic growth, and the relevance of Ruskin’s thinking for understanding the ecological concerns of the late nineteenth century as well as those of our own era.

11am

John Peek Conference Room