Ruskin in America 

     For someone who never visited the North American side of the Atlantic, John Ruskin had a profound and formative influence on American art and social reform in the period from 1850 to Word War I. Much of that influence centered on the British critic’s long association with Charles Elliot Norton, who pioneered the teaching of art history at Harvard University, and whose “circle” included many of the most prominent figures in 19th century American painting and criticism. Prominent among these: Charles Herbert Moore, who studied drawing under Ruskin in the 1870s, was director of the Fogg Museum; Norton students Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardiner went on to have seminal careers as aesthetic taste-makers and collectors; the group of American Ruskinians who painted in Italy: Moore, Henry Newman, Harold Broadfield Warren, Denman Ross, and Joseph Lindon Smith not only adopted Ruskin’s drawing methods themselves but brought the Master’s aesthetics to bear on the arts curricula of American art academies and universities. Warren, for example, based his instructions at the Harvard School of Architecture on Ruskin’s theories until his long tenure there ended in 1930.

     A large and significant group of watercolorists associated with the short-lived American Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood published the journal “The New Path: For the Advancement of Truth in Art” in 1863, in which they surveyed American art with a Ruskinian eye. It was through this magazine, as well as William Stillman’s popular drawing journal, “The Crayon,” that Ruskin’s views on “precision seeing” influenced many of the most important American painters of the 19th century: Asher B. Durand, Frederick Edwin Church, John Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt. We should also note in this connection that a significant number of the American artists who modelled themselves after aspects of Ruskin’s aesthetic program, and with his encouragement, were women: for example, watercolorist Fidelia Bridges and the remarkable book designer and illustrator Francesca Alexander.

     At the end of the 19th century, a young American sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, visited Ruskin at his estate in Brantwood, in the Lake Country. (Borglum, later, designed and carved the Mount Rushmore Monument in South Dakota.) The youthful American’s enthusiasm in Ruskin’s presence encapsulates the 19th-century America art world’s long tutelage under the British Master. While Ruskin spoke with his guests, Borglum made sketches of the old man, seated in his library. Borglum later wrote: “Ruskin had drawn into himself. He knew his worth. He had full confidence in his own strength, but he was sad. The most marvelous, magnificent, unappreciated genius the world has ever known. As soon as I have time, I will make a statue of him.” And in 1903, he did so – a seated bronze portrait of Ruskin, a tribute from an American artist, symbol of the vital role Ruskin played in the emergence of an American aesthetic. 

-Gabriel Meyer

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American “Ruskin Colonies”

(Adapted from Sara Atwood, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, Chapter 6)

 

     In the late 1890s, Ruskin’s influence intersected the communitarian movement in America, reaching into the unlikely context of the American South when disciples there established colonies in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida based on Ruskin’s St. George’s Guild. The Ruskin Colony in central Tennessee was founded in 1894 by Julius A. Wayland, publisher of the socialist newspaper the Coming Nation. Wayland was deeply influenced by Ruskin’s critique of political economy and drawn to the concept of a human economy characterized by compassion rather than competition and greed. Colonists of Ruskin, Tennessee practiced lived and worked communally; property was held in common and wages were equal for both men and women. In his study of the Ruskin colonies in America, A Socialist Utopia in the New South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, notes that in organizing the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, Wayland rejected Ruskin’s call for a paternalistic, hierarchical social order, as well as his disdain for mechanical means of production. The colony, moreover, was driven by a belief in the socialist political agenda rather than by the Christian ethos of Ruskin’s St. George’s Guild. Yet the Ruskin Colony’s debt to Ruskin’s ideas is unmistakable, especially in regard to its educational ideals and practices.

     Like Ruskin the colonists believed in reform through education. Only through education could a more ethical, socially just society be realized. The colony required that education be provided for all children and supported equal education for both boys and girls. Because the colonists believed that education should be adapted to a child’s nature and needs they rejected competitive examination and rewards, arbitrary rules and punishments, and recitation and memorization. At the colony school, pupils were instructed in such subjects as drawing, painting, modeling, writing, natural history, chemistry, oratory, physical exercise, geometry, and music. The colony supported a weekly lyceum and frequent plays and musical performances. Active learning also played an important role; students observed and engaged with nature and developed essential manual skills. However, the Ruskin colony school was not a complete success. Brundage explains that inadequate funding and supplies, inferior facilities, and a steady turnover in instructors plagued the school and parents frequently disagreed regarding its educational aims. Despite several measurable accomplishments and considerable effort, the success of the Ruskin Colony’s educational experiment rests primarily in the possibilities that it suggested. The colony itself did not endure long. In 1899 it collapsed over internal disputes and was forced to auction its property. The remaining Ruskinites reestablished themselves at Waycross, Georgia, where sickness and disease led to the ultimate failure of the enterprise in 1901.

     Ruskin, Florida was slightly more successful than either Ruskin, Tennessee or Ruskin, Georgia, and drew several members from those failed colonies. Founded in 1906 by Dr. George McAnelly Miller, formerly president of the failed Ruskin College in Missouri, the Florida colony promoted the ideals of shared property and responsibility. Ruskin boasted a Commongood Society dedicated to community improvements, a cooperative general store, and Ruskin College, where students pursued a liberal curriculum (Ruskin Historical Society). The college, constructed from local materials, remained in operation until World War I, which drained the colony of its young people. In 1918 all but two college buildings (the Arts Building and the President’s House, which still exist today) were destroyed by fire. Dr. Miller’s death in the

following year meant that the college would never reopen and effectively signaled the end of the colony as well. Although the Ruskin Commongood society endured into the 1960s and a town named Ruskin, Florida exists to this day on the site of the former colony, few besides Ruskin specialists and local historians are familiar with the story of its origins. These short-lived social experiments have become little more than a footnote to American history.