March 10 – May 27, 2018
“Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating,” wrote British critic and artist John Ruskin. Nearly one hundred years later, Brandywine Valley artist Andrew Wyeth advised artists to simply, “hold a mirror up to nature. Don’t overdo it, don’t underdo it.” Even though Ruskin came of age during the Industrial Revolution, and Wyeth after the World Wars, the two artists shared a life-long obsession with the close observation of nature. The exhibition Eye on Nature: Andrew Wyeth and John Ruskin, on view March 10 – May 27, 2018, explores how both artists portrayed nature and the environment during tumultuous eras in human history.
Eye on Nature, organized by Margaretta S. Frederick, the Annette Woolard-Provine Curator of the Bancroft Collection at the Delaware Art Museum, presents approximately 30 rare watercolors by John Ruskin between 1838 and 1883, the largest number of Ruskin drawings seen in the United States for 25 years. The exhibition will also include 28 watercolors and dry brush by Andrew Wyeth between 1940 and 2008. Eye on Nature will be accompanied by a full range of public programs, including tours, lectures, and family and school programs.
This major exhibition will shed new light on both artists’ longstanding legacies. Both worked through periods of great upheaval and doubt: Ruskin during the Industrial Revolution and Wyeth during the Great Depression, World War II, and Cold War. Despite living during times of turmoil, both Ruskin and Wyeth devoted their lives to the pursuit of capturing the world around them, including studies of rocks, plants, and trees. Ruskin was after what he referred to as the “pure transcript” of nature whereas Wyeth looked to elevate his interpretation of nature through imagination.
“If we look at the history of art we can’t help but notice the recurrence of certain themes, interests, styles that link the work of the artists of one period or nationality with another,” explains Frederick. “Sometimes these links are not terribly clear. By taking two artists who worked at such vastly different times and places and looking at their work together, viewers will walk away with a deeper understanding how each artist turned to nature as subject matter to better understand our world.”
Artwork by John Ruskin is on loan from the Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University). Works by Andrew Wyeth are from the Museum’s permanent collection as well as from private collections. This will be the largest loan ever from the Ruskin Library collection to the U.S., and the largest number of Ruskin drawings seen in the U.S. for 25 years. Several of the Wyeth drawings have never been exhibited before.
According to Frederick, both artists sought in nature some universal truth. For Ruskin, the act of drawing brought him closer to understanding a thing, while the drawing itself was of little importance. Most of his drawings are unfinished, for once he had captured the essence of an thing or place he had no desire to carry on with unnecessary compositional repetitions and refinements. For Wyeth, the untimely death of his father introduced elements of loneliness and psychological tension to his realist rural imagery. “It’s a moment that I’m after,” he once said. “I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.”
“Both artists were inspired by and curious about, even obsessed with, understanding the world around them. Understanding was achieved through capturing it on paper,” says Frederick. “For Wyeth, the drawing of these things represented a process of discovery. And similarly, Ruskin believes that to draw it, was to know it.”
To view large images and caption information, click below.
https://www.delart.org/press-room/museum-presents-major-exhibition-of-andrew-wyeth-and-john-ruskin/
Sycamore Tree, Study for Pennsylvania Landscape, 1941 Andrew Wyeth
(1917-2009). Ink and watercolor, 29 3/4 x 39 3/8 inches. Delaware Art
Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Phelps, 1964. © 2018 Andrew
Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Mountain Rock and Alpine Rose, 1844 (or 1849). John Ruskin (1819 – 1900). Pencil, ink, chalk, watercolor and gouache, 11 3/4
Mountain Rock and Alpine Rose, 1844 (or 1849). John Ruskin (1819 –
1900). Pencil, ink, chalk, watercolor and gouache, 11 3/4 x 16 1/4
inches. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University) (RF
1395).
.
Aiguille Charmoz, Chamonix, 1849. John Ruskin (1819 – 1900). Pencil, ink and watercolor, 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 inches. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University) (RF 892)
Trees in a Lane, perhaps at Ambleside, 1847. John Ruskin (1819 –
1900). Pencil, black and brown ink, and ink wash, 17 5/8 x 22 5/8
inches. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University) (RF
1559).
Ravine at Maglans, c. 1849. John Ruskin (1819 – 1900). Pencil, black
and brown ink and gouache, 11 x 8 3/8 inches. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin
Library, Lancaster University) (RF 946).
About John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Born as an only child into an upper middle class and ambitious family, Ruskin was encouraged to draw. Throughout his life, he was rarely without a paper and pen, recording the world around him in a manner that bordered on obsessive, noting the importance of seeing and observing as paramount to understanding the world in which he lived.John Ruskin was the leading art critic of the Victorian period. He published over 250 works on art and literary criticism, politics, and social reform. His multi-volume Modern Painters (1843-60) changed the direction of British art, championing the work of J.M. W. Turner and arguing for ‘truth to nature’ as the principal towards which all art must aspire. He was particularly influential to the young Pre-Raphaelites, whom he championed in the face of negative critical review.
He advocated for the importance of art-and beauty in the working class life, equating beauty with morality. He taught drawing (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men’s College beginning in the mid-1850s. In 1869, he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. In 1871, he purchased Brantwood in the English Lake District, where he lived primarily from 1872 until his death.
About Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
American painter Andrew Wyeth was the son of the illustrator N.C. Wyeth. He was raised in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he maintained a home and studio throughout his life. He was educated at home receiving artistic training from his father. From N.C., he learned the importance of observing a subject from all aspects, even those that were not visible. At age 20, Wyeth had his first solo show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. The entire inventory of watercolors sold out.In 1945, N.C. Wyeth was killed when his car was struck by a train at a railway crossing in Chadds Ford, PA. This event, as well as the onset of World War II, introduced a darker side in Andrew Wyeth’s subject matter that alludes to the brevity of life expressed through a deeply personal symbolism. Elements of loneliness, spiritual malaise, and psychological tension lie beneath a surface veneer of realist rural imagery. He wrote of his need to “get inside of reality”, a process that was so intense it may well have served as a form of emotional therapy.
In the late 1930s, Wyeth began painting in tempera as it forced him to slow down and study a subject in depth before committing to the painstaking layering that the medium required. Wyeth worked from preliminary sketches–often in watercolor, examples of which will be included in the exhibition–to finished composition gradually paring down the image in
