Milo Naeve Reviews
The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle
The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 2007) Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Virginia Anderson, Melissa Renn, and Susan C. Ricci
104 pages (57 color illustrations and 24 black and white)
ISBN 13: 978-1-891771-44-6
Paper Cover Only: $17.95
Available: Harvard University Art Museum Shop: 617-496-5698
A generation---twenty-two years---after documentation of the American Pre-Raphaelite movement of the 1860s it is the subject of another effort tracing a lingering influence at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from the 1870s into the 1910s. Linda Ferber and William H. Gerdts were co-curators of “The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites” at the Brooklyn Museum in the spring of 1985 and co-editors of the catalogue for the exhibition. In that book Annette Blaugrund summarized the career of Charles Herbert Moore (1840-1930) (p. 193). The new exhibition by the co-curators Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Virginia Anderson explores Moore’s late career in detail, especially in relation to Harvard, and the catalogue documents his tenure there and that of his mentor Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908). The exhibition was from April 7 to July 8, 2007. But the catalogue for it remains a pertinent reference in American art history.
Norton and Moore are not well known outside of Cambridge and Boston. There they remained disciples of John Ruskin (1819-1900). The English author, critic, teacher, photographer, and amateur artist became known to Americans through the first volume of American Painters, published in England in 1845 and in the United States in 1847. By 1860 it had flowed into five volumes. Other books and pamphlets on architecture, technique in drawing, and criticism placed his name constantly before Americans.
His pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism of 1851 forcefully defended the new group of painters aiming to reform English painting to the standards which they believed prevailed before Raphael. The movement gained support among the American public to a limited degree and among a few American artists by an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite pictures exhibited in major cities of the United States in 1857 and 1858. The short-lived movement reached a climax here in the late 1860s. Briefly influencing many Americans, such as Winslow Homer, it mainly led to meticulously rendered and therefore small works of art in oils and watercolors, especially landscapes and nature studies, and occasionally portraits.
The twenty-three-year old Boston merchant Charles Eliot Norton introduced himself to Ruskin in London in 1850. He became a firm friend and lifetime advocate of the Englishman during a long teaching career at Harvard beginning in 1874.
By 1866 Norton had met Charles Herbert Moore. The young artist of the Hudson River School gradually adopted the Pre-Raphaelite manner. In 1871 Norton arranged for him to teach drawing at Harvard. Moore sailed to England in 1876 with Norton’s letter of introduction to Rushkin, and Moore joined him as a student during Italian travels of 1877 and 1878. Returning to Harvard, Moore gained increasing responsibilities of teaching drawing, design, and art history in Norton’s shadow as Ruskin’s disciple. In 1895 Moore became the curator of the new Fogg Art Museum and the director of it from 1896 to 1909.
Interaction between Ruskin, Norton, and Moore is traced in detail through three catalogue essays mostly by members of the Department of American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts at the Harvard University Art Museum. One is by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. (Curator) and Susan C. Ricci (independent scholar), another by Virginia Anderson (Assistant Curator), and a third by Melissa Renn (Curatorial Assistant).
Excellent illustrations support the text. Many record works of art by artists associated with Harvard during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that reveal their approach as background for theoretical discussions. Other illustrations document drawings and watercolors originally acquired for teaching studio arts or art history and now transferred to the Fogg Art Museum. Especially notable artworks in the group are by John Ruskin, William Henry Hunt, Joseph M. W. Turner, and Charles Herbert Moore. Most are exceptional in quality, and it is pertinent to have them between the covers for a convenient reference.
The publication lacks an index, unfortunate for one of this significance, but it does include other valuable features. They are biographies by Susan C. Ricci and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. for people prominent in the text, a “List of Illustrations” with detailed information about them, and an adequate “Bibliography”. The text is documented carefully, and it is reliable, though it does seem difficult for Bostonians to accept that their Arts and Crafts Society was not the first in the United States.
The exhibition and the catalogue recording it are by the Department of American Arts organized at Harvard in 2002. The success of these endeavors should be encouragement for many others in American art at Harvard
About Milo M. Naeve
Milo M. Naeve is Field-McCormick Curator Emeritus of American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. Naeve frequently lectures in the United States and in England. He is the author of catalogue essays, articles, and his several books include The Classical Presence in American Arts (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1978), John Lewis Krimmel: An Artist in Federal America (University of Delaware, 1987), and Identifying American Furniture, editions of 1981, 1989, 1998.
Mr. Naeve began his career at Winterthur, administered the Department of Collections at Colonial Williamsburg, directed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and administered the American arts at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1975 to 1991. Among his honors, he is on the editorial board of The American Art Journal and received The Decorative Arts Society award for The Most Distinguished Article Published in the Decorative Arts in 1996. Abroad, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his contribution to studies of the English background of the American arts.
