A sketch of an angel being beset by harpies.

Raindrops on Roses: Curator’s Choice

16 January – 31 March 2017

An exhibition of ‘favourite things’ from the Whitehouse Collection.

The Whitehouse Collection at the Museum is the largest existing collection of material relating to John Ruskin (1819-1900) and his circle.

A watercolour of a Bullfinch bird with brown and red feathers and a patch of white on its breast. — Henry Stacy Marks, ‘Bullfinch’, 1890, 1996P0318 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

A watercolour of a white cockatoo. — John Ruskin, ‘Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Sketched At Zoo’, 1877, 1996P1535 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

Chosen entirely from work in the Whitehouse Collection, this exhibition comprised personal favourites of Stephen Wildman, who was, until September 2017, Director and Curator of the Museum. The display included a number of works which have never, or rarely, been displayed.

Two maps of Arabia drawn in pencil, watercolour and white. — John Ruskin, ‘Arabia – Two Maps’, n.d., 1996P0948 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

A map of Arabia drawn in a notebook. — John Ruskin, ‘Diary of John Ruskin – 1871’, 1871, MS 17 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

In the catalogue to the exhibition of his Turner watercolours and drawings held at the Fine Art Society in 1878, Ruskin remarked that “in the forthcoming number of Fésole [The Laws of Fésole, 1877-79], I place map-making first among the elementary exercises which include subsequent colour; with certain geographical modifications in their construction, of which I may say in forestalment now, that every chief exercise map is to be a square of ten, fifteen, or thirty degrees – European countries mostly coming in squares of ten degrees, India and Arabia in squares of thirty – and the degree is to be divided always into sixty (so-called) miles, of which great measure of longitude and latitude I hope my young students will form a sure practical estimate by often walking it.”