Valuing John Ruskin

The Royal Society, London. 4 October 2022.

Speaker: Joan Winterkorn

Joan Winterkorn – world-leading expert on archives and literary and historical manuscripts –will give the 2022 Mikimoto Lecture. Joan was responsible for valuing The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection on behalf of the National Memorial Heritage Fund for the purchase of the Collection by Lancaster University in 2018. In the Mikimoto Lecture she will describe her encounters with Ruskin elsewhere – in unexpected archives and collections across the UK and USA, with particular reference to Ruskin as a book collector.

About the Speaker

After spending the early part of the 1970s working in London and New York as an archivist and rare book and manuscript librarian, Joan Winterkorn went on to join Bernard Quaritch Ltd where she spent the next thirty-three years. As Director, and Head of Valuations at Quaritch she oversaw private valuations and sales of noteworthy archives and papers including the archive of the Royal Society of Literature, the Mountbatten Papers, the Coleridge Family Papers and those of Peter Brook, Laurence Olivier and the James Lovelock Papers.

Since 2015, she has been a member of the Acceptance in Lieu Panel and helped secure a number of key collection arranged the acceptance of a number of key collections, including the Murray Archive, the Baroness Thatcher Archive, the Charles Sturt Papers, the Butler Papers.

More recently, as part of her ongoing work with the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, Joan has been instrumental in securing archives of significant importance for the nation. These include the Winston Churchill Archive, the John Betjeman Library, the Alan Turing Papers, the ‘Lost Photographs’ of Captain Scott and the Minton Archive, amongst others.

Joan is a Trustee of the Pilgrim Trust, a Trustee of The Friends of the National Libraries and a member of The Ruskin Advisory Board. She is part of a Working Group on the UK Literary Heritage and previously sat on the Editorial Board of The Book Collector for twenty-three years.

Her expertise and exceptional record of achievements have been recognised when she was awarded The Benson Medal (2006) by the Royal Society of Literature for services to literature, and an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts by Cambridge University, a rare honour. Joan is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and member of The Groiler Club (New York), and of The Athenaeum (London) where she is a member of the Club’s Library Committee and Archive Group.

Ruskin and his Critics

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2017 was held on 16 November in Lancaster University’s Cavendish Lecture Theatre.

Speaker: Dr Nicholas Shrimpton (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University)

How was John Ruskin criticised? And how did he respond to criticism? Was he arrogantly indifferent or morbidly sensitive? With particular attention to his work in the 1850s (especially the last three volumes of Modern Painters and his Academy Notes), this lecture argues that response to opposition was a key feature of Ruskin’s mode of discourse.

Nicholas Shrimpton is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University, where he was previously a Fellow & Tutor in English and Vice-Principal. His writing on Ruskin includes the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on his work (2002, 15th ed.), ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’ in Dinah Birch’s (1999) Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ‘Ruskin and ‘War’’ (Guild of St George, 2014) and his essays on ‘Italy’ and ‘Politics and Economics’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (2015). At the time of this lecture, he was working on the new OWC edition of the poems of William Blake.

Ruskin: Language and Architecture

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2016 was held on 17 November in Lancaster University’s Management School (Lecture Theatre 1).

Speaker: Professor William Whyte (University of Oxford)

St Mark’s in Venice, John Ruskin once wrote, should be thought of “less as a temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of Common Prayer”. But what does it mean to say that a building is like a book? What does this say about buildings? What does it say about books? In this lecture, Professor William Whyte explores why it was that Ruskin and his contemporaries so often saw architecture as a kind of language, and what this insight meant for the ways that Victorians built and wrote.

Ruskin and Forgetting

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2015 was held on 19 November in Lancaster University’s Management School (Lecture Theatre 1).

Speaker: Professor Francis O’Gorman (University of Leeds)

This lecture considers the place of forgetting in John Ruskin’s sustained writing on memory. Thinking in particular about Ruskin’s conception of architecture as a way of remembering, Professor Francis O’Gorman explores what it might mean to be remembered only in pieces or inaccurately. Ruskin preferred these to being misunderstood, which was what he frequently found true of himself. Forgetfulness was, in turn, clarifying for Ruskin even if it was, to an extent, falsifying. And this poses an intriguing question now for the reader of Ruskin, in all his extensive multiplicity. Do we understand him better if we forget a lot?

Ruskin and the Point of Failure

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2014 was held on 20 November in Lancaster University’s Frankland Lecture Theatre.

Speaker: Professor Dinah Birch (University of Liverpool)

What does it mean to succeed? For John Ruskin, an acceptance of the necessity of failure and imperfection was essential to the fulfilment of human potential. In this lecture, Professor Dinah Birch explores the roots of this conviction, placing Ruskin’s ideas in the wider context of 19th century religious and cultural history, and arguing that his hostility towards ideals of perfection was among the most influential and stimulating features of his thought.

Ruskin among the Giants

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2013 was held on 14 November in Lancaster University’s Cavendish Lecture Theatre.

Speaker: Professor John Batchelor (Newcastle University)

John Ruskin (1819-1900) had a life span just slightly shorter than that of Queen Victoria. He and she were the two giants who spanned the whole of his age, and some of his most productive and fruitful interactions and disagreements were with the artists and writers who guided the central Victorian cultural energies, including Carlyle, Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Burne-Jones and G.F. Watts.

Ruskin’s earliest modelling was from men who were older and in his eyes stronger, starting with his own father, John James. His dependent relationship with his father helped to shape his feelings about his first heroes: Wordsworth, Turner and, in a different way, Carlyle, who as a personal friend powerfully influenced the young Ruskin. Later, as a major critic, Ruskin became a father figure himself to the young Pre-Raphaelites, although his interaction with Millais was famously troubled and resulted in the end of Ruskin’s disastrous marriage with Effie Gray. The great artists of the past whom he discovered as he worked on the successive volumes of Modern Painters became further giants in his landscape, though not consistently; Michelangelo became a contentious figure in his later thinking, while Veronese and Tintoretto caused him to reconsider his earlier resistance to the Renaissance as whole. As Ruskin’s enthusiasms and crusades expanded in their range after the 1870s, his position among the giants became affected by his own emotional storms, to a point where he had difficulty separating his thoughts from his relationships and circumstances.

Ruskin Engels and the City

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2012 was held on 29 November in Lancaster University’s Faraday Lecture Theatre.

Speaker: Dr Tristram Hunt, MP

The philosophies of Friedrich Engels and John Ruskin were both powerfully shaped by the Victorian city. In its filth, vulgarity and rampant individualism, they found a telling symbol of all the failings of industrial capitalism. All that was wrong with ‘laissez-faire’ society could be found in 1840s Manchester. But their competing visions of a socialist alternative entailed very different futures for city life: for Engels, modernity and suburbia; for Ruskin, preservation and urban density. In their blistering prose and inspiring polemics, they offered two ideals of civic socialism which continue to influence urban debate today.

John’s Gospel

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2011 was held on 1 December in Lancaster University’s Management School (Lecture Theatre 1).

Speaker: Professor Michael Wheeler

For this lecture we welcomed back the founding Director of the Ruskin Library project and research programme at Lancaster University, Professor Michael Wheeler, who in 1999 completed his 26 years as an academic at Lancaster and moved to work on the Chawton House Library project in Hampshire. In this illustrated lecture based on research for his recent book, St John and the Victorians (2011), Prof. Wheeler considers John Ruskin’s imaginative response to some of the best known stories in the New Testament – the marriage at Cana, Jesus and the woman at the well, and the raising of Lazarus – and works of art based on these stories. Ruskin’s personal motto was inspired by a verse from John’s Gospel, and when he died in 1900 a working man sent a wreath with an epitaph taken from the prologue: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”

This lecture complemented the theme of our 2011 – 2012 Ruskin Seminar series: ‘Ruskin and the Sacred’.

‘No wealth but life’: Ruskin and Cultural Value

The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2010 was held on 18 November in Lancaster University’s Management School (Lecture Theatre 1).

Speaker: Professor Robert Hewison (City, University of London)

This lecture was held around the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. It recalls the financial crisis that prompted Ruskin to begin writing about economics, explores his reading of orthodox economists, and traces the development of Ruskin’s ideas about the true nature of ‘value’. The modern theory of Cultural Value, Prof. Robert Hewison argues, has been developed as a response to the pressure on cultural institutions to justify themselves in utilitarian terms – terms that Ruskin would recognize, and deplore. Hewison suggests that the demands of modern public management, as represented by the proposed structure of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), call for the development of a parallel theory of academic value.

Ruskin and Rossetti: a queer friendship
The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2009 was held on 4 November in Lancaster University’s Management School (Lecture Theatre 1).

Speaker: Professor Barrie Bullen (Professor Emeritus, University of Reading)

In this lecture, Professor Barrie Bullen details John Ruskin’s often demanding patronage of Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall. He also unpicks the strands of a complicated web woven around Rossetti’s artistic development during the 1850s and 1860s, and reveals how the chronology of paintings and private lives can be closely interlinked.