A black and white depiction of a boulder in a tree covered landscape.

Connecting Collections

Amongst the nineteenth-century’s most perceptive critics, Ruskin made defining and discipline-shaping contributions to fields ranging from fine art and architecture, natural sciences and political economy, to ecology and maths.

Ruskin was close friends with Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of art history. Norton had had been inspired by Ruskin’s position as Oxford University’s first Slade Professor of Art, and persuaded his cousin—University president Charles William Eliot—to add art history to the College’s curriculum. Ruskin’s student Charles Herbert Moore later became the first director of Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.

A detailed drawing of a spiky spiral shell. — **_{Left to right:}**
_{John Ruskin, ‘JR: Nautilus 1868 Wks XXI pl 31 CW 1183’, n.d., Box C:20 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University}
_{John Ruskin, ‘Fragment of the Alps’, c.1854–1856, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Samuel Sachs © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1919.506}
_{John Ruskin, ‘JR: Crab, velvet Wks XXI pl 31 CW 571’, n.d., Box C:6 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University}

The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection contains glass slides depicting paintings by John Ruskin which are held in other Ruskin collections around the world.

Launching a digital collections platform is a critical aspect of The Ruskin’s ambition to open the Collection to a wider audience, locally and globally, including the optimisation of the research potential of the Collection via practices and tools compliant with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The project is integrating built-in capability to enable future AI enhancements of the portal’s IIIF-based tools and usability (e.g. visual narratives, interactive and guided storytelling, digital exhibitions, OCR, connection to aggregator sites such as Europeana and Internet Archive).

As one of Ruskin’s executors, Norton collected many of Ruskin’s works, which now form the foundation of Harvard Art Museum’s. Those holdings have been supplemented by extensive donations from R. Dyke Benjamin ’59, held at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Working with Knowledge Integration and Ninesenses, the project involves:

Work by the technical teams at both institutions to link the Harvard and Lancaster University digital platforms to ensure IIF interoperability. This is a pilot for similar linked Ruskin collections, such as the Ashmolean Museum and Sheffield Millennium Gallery in the UK.
Research assistance to integrate the labelling of the two collections and thematic links between them.
New photography of related works in The Ruskin collections which are not at the required DPI
Photography of the works in the Dyke Ruskin collections not yet digitised.
Digital exhibitions of the findings.

Project Leads: Professor Sandra Kemp, The Ruskin, and Leslie Morris, Houghton Library