The exhibition will include more than 100 works and stretch across six rooms. It is one of the biggest exhibitions in the UK during the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth (8 February 1819).
Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud will be the first in-depth examination of the relationship between both men, their work, and the impact Ruskin had in highlighting climate change.
Image: John Ruskin, Dawn, Coniston, 1873, Watercolour over pencil, Acquired with the support of a V&A Purchase Grant and the Friends of Abbot Hall, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria
Abbot Hall is partnering with York Art Gallery and University of York on Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud. Works from both partners go on show alongside substantial loans from national and regional collections.
Ruskin (1819-1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, prominent social thinker and philanthropist.
JMW Turner (1775-1881) was a landscape painter, traveller, poet and teacher. Many people consider him the first modern painter. Ruskin said of Turner he was ‘the greatest of the age’ and was a lifelong supporter.
The exhibition will feature watercolours, drawings and a haunting portrait of Ruskin from the National Portrait Gallery, made in the aftermath of his first serious mental illness.
In 1884 Ruskin wrote about an encroaching “Storm Cloud” - a darkening of the skies that he attributed to the belching chimneys of the modern world. The imagery also allowed him to articulate his ongoing mental struggles.
Image: JMW Turner, The Passage of Mount St Gothard, Taken from the Centre of the Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), 1804 © Lakeland Arts Trust
Bringing together Victorian and contemporary works of art, the exhibition will demonstrate the unsettling messages underpinning Ruskin’s eye for beauty in the natural world.
Ruskin’s anxiety about darkening skies and polluted storm clouds is contrasted with his early interest in Turner’s luminous pictures.
The exhibition contains a substantial display of Turner’s watercolours, demonstrating his evolving style, and his creation of highly-finished sample studies of British and alpine landscapes.
Lakeland Arts’ The Passage of Mount St Gothard (1804) by Turner will be a key painting on show.