A watercolour of a path winding a through woodland with leafy trees standing tall above it with hint of a lake towards the bottom.

Eye on Nature: Wyeth and Ruskin

Delaware Art Museum

10 March – 27 May 2018

This exhibition showcases the works of Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) and John Ruskin (1819–1900). Although they lived in different countries and time periods, both artists recorded the natural world around them in detail within the setting of social and environmental change. For Wyeth, the Depression and the Second World War were major events during his lifetime, whilst Ruskin lived through the Industrial Revolution. For both artists, the natural world provided a constant subject to study during periods of vast change.

A pen, brown ink and ink wash drawing of a Candytuft plant. — John Ruskin, ‘Candytuft’, 1865, 1996P1525 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

John Ruskin was known to draw a subject in order to study it in detail, often accompanying written text on the subject. Ruskin worked on a range of scales from micro to macro, and would connect ideas

When Wyeth initially used watercolours to record aspects of nature he was interested in, and he subsequently started using tempera as well, which he needed to work more slowly due to the properties of the material, and this allowed him to examine the subject in more detail.