How to See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters - Dr. Suzanne Fagence Cooper

John Ruskin, a 19th century art critic, has a lot to teach us in our modern age. He teaches us how to see beauty in the world, how to travel with more care, and how to respond to our own mental fragility and the anxieties of others. Ruskin was a visionary and a prolific writer who had a deep appreciation for the natural world. He recognized the negative impact of industrialization on the environment and emphasized the importance of preserving buildings and nature. He believed in the importance of honesty in architecture and that buildings should be true to their materials. Ruskin's teachings are still relevant today and can help us lead more meaningful lives. He would hate the built-in obsolescence in a lot of the things we buy now, you know, the throwaway culture or the sense that you can't mend stuff. He has this really interesting word called ilth, I-L-L-T-H, ilth, so it's the opposite of wealth. So you can have all the money in the world, but is it being spent for good or for ill? And you can spend money on things which you know are going to make someone's life worse. Jane Morris was very, very intelligent. Even as a young woman who probably had very little formal education, she said she used to read every scrap of paper that came her way. Hello, everyone, welcome to our Artidote podcast. I'm your host, Vashek Armanikas. In this episode, I interview Dr. Suzanne Fagin-Scooper, who is the author of a brilliant book called To See Clearly Why Ruskin Matters. I really enjoyed reading this book because it is about one of the greatest art critics of the 19th century England. His name was John Ruskin. And I believe that in our age of immediacy, John Ruskin has so much to teach us. He can teach us how to see beauty in the world, how to notice beauty in the world. He can teach us how to travel with more care. He tells us how to respond to our own mental fragility and to anxieties of others. He was a visionary and he was a very prolific writer. And this is what I wanted to ask her. I wanted to know how Ruskin impacted her own life. And what does make Ruskin so relevant in the 21st century? I hope you enjoy listening to this episode. Dr. Fagin-Scooper, thank you so much for coming to my podcast. I appreciate it and I'm so excited about this conversation. And to give our listeners an idea about our conversation and what we are going to discuss, I thought I'll read a very short but a very beautiful passage from your book. This will give a glimpse to our listeners of the subject of Ruskin. You write, Teasing out reality and truth from a mass of vague, half-formed or faked material is a skill that we all need, now more than ever. Like Ruskin, we should know what lies beneath the surface, how the traces of the past remain within the present. In simple terms, can we spot a filtered photo or a hidden motive? Are we being fed advertising or information? It is such a beautiful passage that describes generally why I personally find Ruskin so fascinating. In our age when we have so many distractions and very often you read a book, watch a film or listen to a podcast, and then by the end you realize that it was packaged very well. There is not much substance behind it. And that's why I think I found your book very interesting and I want everyone else to know about Ruskin, about your book. Could you please tell a little bit about how did you yourself came across Ruskin? I think Ruskin often is seen as someone very old-fashioned, someone out of touch with our reality now. Every time I've read Ruskin, I found him very encouraging and he gives us the opportunity to think about honesty, to think about the big things, about truth, about what we're making stuff from, where we're traveling to, how we're reading, what our friendships and relationships are like. He interrogates all of those things. So I came to him, art history, I was interested in 19th century painters, particularly Pre-Raphaelites. I was studying them even at school and all the time I kept coming back to this, you know, they were reading Ruskin, they were traveling with him in mind, they were going to look at paintings because he had suggested it, they were building houses because he encouraged them to think about Gothic buildings, Gothic architecture in a fresh way. And so he was always there in the background. And then I was very lucky to be at the University in Oxford, which has an amazing collection at the Ashmolean Museum of Ruskin's watercolors and drawings, which he gave to the university for students to study, to give them an understanding of plant formation, geology, he loves rocks, he loves the wing feathers of birds, and really to give us a way of thinking about art not just as being something fancy and separate from us, but something which actually allows us to really look more closely at small details as well as big things around us, but you know, to take pleasure in the shape of a tree or to take pleasure in the shape of a pebble, you know, and to really get to understand the natural world in a sensitive way, but in a way that then we use those skills, those kind of interrogation skills to apply that to other aspects of our lives. And that was, it was the dynamic that he produces between the very personal, the very small and then the big questions, and he's always leaping from one to the other. And he allows us to kind of go with him in that. Yeah, there is a strong connection that he's not talking about abstract political ideas, he's talking how we can change ourselves to be in harmony with the world and to create meaningful art and to live meaningful lives, and I believe that's really fascinating about him. And also what is surprising is how, let's say, progressive for his time he was, because he cared about the environment, he looked at how mass consumerism is coming, and people are not being able to discriminate between good and bad. And I was wondering what was, like, all of this makes sense to us in 21st century when we experience all this, like, content coming to us in enormous quantities. But back in his time, in the 19th century, it was a bit different, and I wanted to ask you if you can tell me what kind of, what made him realize that the environment is going bad, that we need to learn how to discriminate, we need to preserve buildings and not to destroy them. He recognized, Ruskin recognized, that he was very privileged in himself. He could travel, he could spend time writing, he could spend time reading. He wasn't, you know, he never actually did a full day's work in his life. He didn't have to earn any money because his parents had earned it, his father had earned money and was setting it aside for him all the time. So he recognized he had this leisure, and he didn't want to be idle, so he uses that time to then travel to the Alps, to Northern Italy, to the Lake District, and he's always making diary notes, he's always doing little drawings of the sky or things he's passing, you know, churches he's passing, or meadows he's passing, he's constantly writing it down and making little drawings of it to remember what things look like. And when he goes back five years later, ten years later, forty years later, he is then able to compare what it was like when he was a boy with what it looks like now, and he genuinely is shocked by, say he goes to Mont Blanc, he goes to Chamonix, and he sees what he says the dry bed of a glacier, that he was, you know, he's now able to walk across this glacier bed where it was two hundred feet deep when he first saw it. He can see that things like the glaciers are changing, and he does link that directly to the increase in industrialization. He can see that the rivers that he would sit and stare at for hours at a time as a young man, trying to understand the process of water flowing, or how pebbles are turned and moved downstream. He sat and looked at those rivers and he goes back ten, fifteen years later and he sees the pollution in those rivers, and he knows that this is man-made. And so he is then able to take this kind of rather esoteric ideas that he's been playing with, you know, how does a pebble get from the top of a mountain to the sea, but because he is so closely observing these things, he's then able to jump to the bigger picture and say, we are changing this environment, we are impacting on these meadows, we're impacting on these water flowing, you know, water flows, we are impacting on the snow and the clouds. And he then starts, he moves from being an art critic, he's writing about paintings and writing about drawing, teaching people to draw, and then he moves to being somebody who is speaking out about the bad stewardship of nature, and saying, we are not looking after the world around us. So, but he has that kind of groundwork that he sets there. Before finding out about your book and reading your book, I was, my knowledge of Ruskin was kind of very fragmented. I read, and his works have such unusual titles for a 21st century reader, you know, finding where to start with Ruskin is very difficult if you are not going deep into his works. And the thing that got me fascinated by your book, when I picked it up in Waterstones, by accident, I, first of all, I saw Ruskin's name, and then I saw the way you divided your book. He has the chapters, there are eight chapters, if I'm not mistaken, and some of them are called, like, and they are kind of focusing on each skill that he emphasized, seeing, drawing, building. Could you please tell how did you decide to divide a book like this, you know? It is a very wonderful division, you know, to get familiar with Ruskin. Well, for me, it's very hard, sometimes, to overcome that initial resistance to Ruskin as this man who has a very troubled personal life. And I have written about, you know, his failed marriage to Effie Gray, and, you know, people tend to know that about him, and therefore kind of label him as somebody peculiar, and therefore we don't want to have anything to do with him. For me, that was obviously something I had to wrestle with, but I felt that there was so much more to him than just his failed marriage. So I've spent quite a lot of time working with people who, for whom Ruskin is like the underpinning of their creative lives. And you get to realize that people who are drawing, who are gardening, who are looking after historic buildings, very often Ruskin has drawn them into that world. So for me, it had to be active. It wasn't just worth making another biography of him, because then you kind of pick him apart. What I wanted to do is to show how he has the ability to focus attention on maybe something like grief, something like loss. You know, there are things he grieves for the ancient monuments, the medieval buildings that are being destroyed. He grieves for his parents and for the people he's loved, but he takes us into that. He shows us how that impacts him, and then how he can find resolution. So yes, he teaches us to draw a flower or a pebble, but he also thinks very closely about how we should travel through the world, how we should tread lightly in the world. And for me, that sense that he's not desk-bound, he is active all the time and encouraging all the time. I felt that there's no point in trying to dissect all of his writings. His complete works take up 39 volumes in the edited edition, and there are still more. There are his diaries that aren't passed, there are his letters that aren't passed. He is writing every day. So in order to get to terms with that, I wanted my book to be the first step for someone who doesn't really know where to begin with Ruskin. I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to do everything. I'm just trying to say these are the ways that you can approach him, and you might want to read, you know, if you're interested in architecture, or if you're interested in the relationship between the rooms we live in and how that makes us feel, then you might want to read about the nature of Gothic. That's a little chapter in the Stones of Venice, which has changed people's lives since it was written in the 1850s, and it changed William Morris' life, you know, that is his jumping off point, understanding that your built environment actually impacts your sense of well-being. Ruskin recognised that in the 1850s. Alternatively, you might say, I want to think about how I'm spending my money, and Ruskin talks about charity and philanthropy, and he is a bit sort of paternalistic, I think now, about, you know, how he sees money going through into good works. But he still makes this question, you know, how do the bank, how do bankers work? How are people making their money through circulating money? You know, is this how we want our world to be driven, or is there an alternative? So, you know, through the different chapters of the books, you know, some people will be interested in, you know, his personal life, and there's a bit of it there, but some people will be interested in knowing about Venice, some people will be interested in knowing about gardening and building and planting. You know, there's so many, he's so interdisciplinary that he actually allows us all these different ways into his world. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode, and before we continue, I have one question to ask you. Are you a bibliophile? If you are, I have a newsletter that I send every month. Every month I send a list of my favorite books, my book summaries, notes, podcast episodes. If you love reading books, this newsletter is for you. I'll leave a link in the description of this episode so you can join. And one more thing, I send those newsletters from my personal email address, which means that you can just click the reply button and send me an email with your thoughts, with your favorite reads. With the future episodes, you'll also be able to send some questions to the future authors that I'm going to interview. Thank you very much for listening, and let's continue with the rest of this episode. He kind of tries to teach you how to see the world in a different way, and I was wondering what led him to, what made him to learn how to see? You know, he could have continued as many of his contemporaries, not noticing all these things, the destruction of architecture, of environment, and all of these things. What made him different? You know, what made him to see the world differently the way he did? I think, and it's hard, it's hard sometimes to say this, I think he was genuinely visionary. I think he had, I've been trying to work it out over the years, I think he had a sense of sight that was so highly developed that he could genuinely see things that most people overlooked. It was partly he took the time to do that. So, for example, he looks at a painting by Turner, he really loves Turner's work, but he's really interrogating it and thinking, is that, you know, is that sea wet enough? Is that rock properly drawn? Do I believe in it? And most of us would just scoot over it, but he really looks closely, and it's partly because he had a very solitary upbringing and a very religious upbringing, and so from the outset he was taught that his work, his life had to mean something. Now, he didn't go out to work, he didn't put that meaning into physical production, he put that meaning into writing and teaching. So, there was this combination of things where he had the grounding in a religious, highly Protestant Christianity, which actually puts a lot of emphasis on the word, on preaching and reading and writing, and so he had that ability. I think also he knew he was strange, he knew he was odd, and sometimes that upset him and sometimes it didn't, and he has periods of extreme mental health crises as well, and I think that's one of the things where he becomes human to us, you know, he's not just sat there on a pedestal, he actually opens up to us about, he knows he's going down into depression, he knows he's going down into paranoia, and he writes about it. So, he's very, the personal is always there, and I think that helps us to go with him into these places, and it makes, he never talks down to us, he never, he assumes a lot, but he assumes that he can carry us with him, he's never, you know, he's always trying to explain on terms that we can understand. It does seem that, as you said, that he never talks down, it is a feeling when I read some of his works that he's looking for companionship, you know, he's looking for someone who can understand and see the world in a similar manner and feels as if he's trying to teach kind of people to see the way he sees the world. And also, I found the thought that you mentioned very fascinating, the fact that he didn't have to work hard in his life, or work, let's say, for material, physical survival. There is, of course, the other side of our human being of spiritual survival, you know, and one of the ways is, of course, religion, and another way is seeing beauty, and it feels as if, like, by being privileged not to struggle with the material survival, he obviously, as all of us, had expanded and tried to teach us how to survive spiritually in the world where religion was going down, becoming less popular in the 19th century. So I find it fascinating, and I very often remember, Ruskin, when you walk around London, and there are those survived old buildings that are very cozy, with a lot of detail that elevate you, that you really feel a part of something bigger, and then you see a glass building that doesn't have anything in it. And I was wondering, what do you think, would Ruskin think about the state of architecture, what kind of diagnosis he would give to our age, let's say, in terms of architecture, because it is a very broad question otherwise. I think his fundamental point about architecture was that it had to be honest to the materials, it's truth to materials, and that's something that runs through a lot of 19th century architectural development and the arts and crafts movement. So he would understand if you want to build with glass, then you use those elements of glass and you make a virtue of it. What he hated was architecture that was smug, that was complacent, that was showy-offy. He thought, you know, you want architecture that brings joy to the people inside it. And it may be a massive building, it may be a massive thing like Rouen Cathedral, but because, you know, it is bigger than us, it's overwhelming, but because it is bringing joy, you know, he says all great art is praise. It's that feeling that you're always trying to think bigger than yourself, not in a smug way, not I'm so great that I'm bigger than, it's more like there are things bigger than me and I'm trying to access them and isn't that wonderful? So if he walked into a modern building and he felt cocooned by it, if he felt that the building was sensitive to the material, that the wood was treated like wood and the glass was treated like glass, then he would, I think, accept that and honor the architect. And he found things like, you know, even the Crystal Palace, which was put up in 1851, he found that difficult to go into because it was all iron and glass. And it was built to look like a cathedral, the layout of it was like a cathedral, but it was all for the benefit of people, of man and not of something bigger than man. There was a sense of self-confidence in the things that were being shown and the way they were shown, which had no humility. And he's always trying to make us aware of our own place in the bigger scheme of things. And sometimes that's because you're a very small person in a very big and beautiful building. But he liked buildings that had an organic element to them, so that felt like they were growing up out of their environment, so that they were made of materials that were appropriate to that space. So, yes, you might want iron and glass in a city, but you wouldn't want that in a wood or in a field or greenfield site. You know, if you're going to build a house in a greenfield site, then you want to think about the colours of the bricks. Are they local? You want to look at the colours of the roof, you know, are we supposed to be using slate? Are we supposed to be using tiles? What is appropriate for here? And he recognised that, you know, some buildings do make us feel good about ourselves. You know, it's the balance, it's the proportion, sometimes it's the echoing, the sound quality. And if you can get that right, whether it's a contemporary building or an old building, you know, he knew there were a lot of really hideous old buildings as well. And he didn't expect people to keep them pristine. He expected them to sort of, to mellow and to, you know, disappear eventually. But he hated artificiality, he hated pretense. And so anything that smells of that, I mean, I think you would find a lot of, you know, giant shopping centres now, absolutely horrific. You know, the way that they were focused on consumerism, the way they suck us in, the way that they're not in a human scale, the way that the materials are not used in a sensitive way. You know, something like that, I think he would find very difficult. But a beautifully proportioned modern building, I think he would see the value of that. There is, I think, a sentence in one of your chapters where you say that Ruskin viewed that old buildings do not belong to us, they belong to the previous, to those who built them. And there is a feeling that I've got, maybe I'm mistaken, that also the people who built those buildings, they built not only for them, but for something bigger, as you mentioned, or the next generation, something built to last. And I've got a feeling that Ruskin could feel that the pace of the life of what we create is accelerating and things are becoming more ephemeral in some sense. Yes, I think he would hate the built-in obsolescence in a lot of the things we buy now, you know, the throwaway culture or the sense that you can't mend stuff. You know, he didn't mind things, in fact, he wanted things to be mended, but to show that they're not, you know, what you're doing is kind of adding to or changing the original. So not trying to make it all pristine and perfect, but the idea that you would, you know, have a piece of clothing and wear it once and then throw it away. You know, that would go absolutely against his, because he would think back and he would think back to, you know, the person who sold it to you and the person who shipped it to you and the person who wove it and the person who stitched it and where did that cotton come from and where was the water to irrigate the cotton. You know, he couldn't just look at a t-shirt, for example, and think, well, I don't like the colour, I'll get... You know, he would be very conscious of the chain, the supply chain and the knock-on effects of our consumerism. You know, he does think about, and he makes us think about it as well, about how we're spending our money. And he has this really interesting word called ILF, I-L-L-T-H, ILF. So it's the opposite of wealth. So you can have all the money in the world, but is it being spent, you know, for good or for ill? And you can spend money on things which you know are going to make someone's life worse. And he says, you know, very clearly, if you're buying a bargain, if you know that that thing should be, you should be paying more for it, someone along the line is losing out. And, you know, why should you benefit from somebody else's pain? And that is ILF. So, you know, if he looked around at the way in which money is being spent now and squandered, he would be outraged as, you know, and that's what we carry with us. So if you've got Ruskin kind of in your ear all the time, that outrage that, you know, you can do good or you can do ill. And people are constantly making that choice, or he wants us to make that choice. And obviously he wants us, we can't always do the right thing, but he wants us to be aware and to tend towards it. And he has this amazing other phrase called, he says, there is no wealth but life. All the money in the world is worth nothing. It's life and that's growing and changing and supporting other people and nurturing. That's what life means. And that is the essence of why we bother to do anything, at least in his worldview. It is so inspiring listening to you, like, and I mean, I was inspired by Ruskin long before, but when you describe his vision of the world, it's very inspiring just simply because it is many things that you mentioned are approached today from a political angle, which is very dry and soulless very often. And Ruskin talks about the same things from a spiritual angle, from self-transformation. And I find it very nourishing and inspiring, as I said. Another thing that I'm personally like guilty of is of indiscriminate sightseeing of traveling and trying to see everything in Florence in one day or in one week or in one month. Back in his time, the traveling was becoming more and more popular and affordable. And he teaches us how to travel properly. And can you tell a little bit about that? Ruskin was very aware that by writing about Venice, when Ruskin first went to Venice, there were no tourists there. And he was aware that by writing about Venice, he was encouraging people to go. And he knew that and he knew even by the end of his own life that Venice had become a tourist trap, partly because of his enthusiasm for it. And he writes about Florence a couple of decades later in the 1870s. He writes a wonderful guidebook to Florence called Mornington Florence. Well, he basically assumes you're going to be going and looking at churches and art in the morning, then traveling or shopping in the afternoon. So he's already there in the mindset of most tourists. And he knows that we want to get through, you know, and tick things off our list. And so he will take us into a church or a chapel and he will just say, you know, if you're only going to look at two things, these are the frescoes you need to look at. But then he will say, just think about how long it has taken the person to make these frescoes. And he will then say, I have spent this one particular chapel, the Spanish chapel, with huge frescoes all around the walls in Florence. He says that he has already spent basically a month up on scaffolding, cataloging all the pictures in this chapel, and he still has not finished. And he still doesn't know what they all mean. So he recognizes that, you know, most of the people who come through will spend 20 minutes in there. They can't ever get to know it. He can't ever get to know it. But he's aware of our failings. And he also says, OK, read this on the train. I'm going to tell you all the things you missed and that's fine because they're still there. I can still go and see them today and I can take Ruskin with me. And I think he's also conscious that the speed of travel means that we don't look at the landscape at walking pace. Walking pace is what you need. And, you know, he's very keen on, in his writings and his diaries, on getting out of the carriage, getting out of the train. He actually hated trains, but getting out and walking through a landscape because then you can think about it in a much more sensitive way. Walking up a mountain. He does this quite often and he loves being at the top of a mountain and feeling that freshness and running along the tops of mountains. And then he writes to his mother and says, don't worry, I didn't get cold. You know, it's perfectly, perfectly fine. Because she worries that he will, you know, catch a chill or something. No, it's wonderful. I never felt so alive as on the top of this mountain. So, again, he's aware that by drawing attention to glaciers or mountains or these places, he will then draw people in his wake that will attack more tourists. And he wrestles with that a lot. But he's a really good traveling companion. You know, keep him in your pocket. No, I can imagine. And it is so interesting that many of the thinkers that I personally admire in history, they really emphasize the importance of walking. You know, we take it as like, oh, I'll walk to the station. But it has a much deeper philosophical meaning to be able to walk as Ruskin, as you said, that it was not just simple action. It was viewing surroundings and feeling the space around him. How well known he was back in his time? And what was he particularly known for? Was he for his art criticism or for his travel guides? What made him famous? At one point in the 1850s and 1860s, he was the most famous art writer in Britain. And he was also famous in America and translated into French as well. So he was the big name. If you think of somebody like, I don't know, someone like Grayson Perry, who is, you know, everybody knows who they are. Everybody has an idea about what they stand for. Everybody has a sense of their style, what they like, you know, on speaking in different ways. So making things, but also teaching, but also, you know, being visible as a figure in art galleries. Obviously, you know, there wasn't television or radio. But Ruskin was hugely disseminated through print mediums. So newspapers, magazines. He produced his own magazine called For's Clavigera, which is a rubbish title for anything in Latin. But For's Clavigera is like a blog. And from the 1870s, 1880s, he was writing this newsletter to his readers every couple of weeks. And he would write about stuff he read in the newspaper, stuff he'd been thinking about, you know, letters that people sent to him. It was really, you know, it was very immediate. So he moves from being somebody who is known for, you know, writing art criticism about the Royal Academy shows, to being somebody who's teaching at Oxford University, to somebody who is just, his criticism or praise could make or break an artist. And so that's why in the 1870s, there's this big controversy because he criticizes one of James Whistler's paintings and says that James Whistler, it's a falling rocket, it's an octagon. And Ruskin says, it's like flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. You know, this is not art that's worth that amount of money. It may be a sketch, it may be an idea, but it is not worth, there's a value to art and this is not worth it. And so Whistler, because he knows Ruskin is such a big name, he takes Ruskin to court, the libel, and saying, you know, you could destroy my business by speaking like this. So it's a really fascinating moment. It's this tussle between effectively sort of abstract aesthetic art and the kind of moralistic, what is this worth, that Ruskin comes to his point of view. And so you can see that all happening in 1878. And after that, Ruskin, of course, loses confidence because he no longer feels that he's at the forefront of art criticism. But instead, he turns towards writing about the landscape, pollution, morality, philanthropy, those kind of things. But he also has a huge mental health crisis, kind of at that moment as well. So he withdraws and becomes silent for a while. So he is hugely well known, hugely famous. But actually, for the last decade of his life, never seen in public, never heard in public. So it's a very, yeah, it's very interesting how his career, his reputation ebbs and flows. I really kind of answered the question that I was about to follow about the court case with Whistler. You mentioned in your book that the decision by the judge might be kind of a decisive moment for the artist in terms of that the judge ruled out that if artist claims that this is art, therefore it's art. I wanted to ask you your opinion about it. Do you think, could you tell a little bit more of possible kind of outcomes that this court case that led Truskin into depression and I think bankrupted Whistler, if I'm not mistaken? What kind of broader influence did it have? I think it was the moment where artists were able to break free from that focus on the word, the spoken word or the written word, because you get the idea that literature or narrative or poetry should be, you know, there should be a story that a painting tells and it should be true or it should at least be a true representation of a thing that actually exists. For Whistler, he was creating images from memory. So he'd go out onto the river or he'd go to Cremorne Gardens, which was his pleasure gardens where they had the fireworks, and he would look at things, but he wouldn't make sketches on the spot. He would remember and then go back into the studio and then rework it. And he would also, so what he's doing is something which is not absolutely true. It's a version of events and it's been filtered through his memory. I think what is interesting, if you look at that court case, is that Burne-Jones, Edward Burne-Jones was called in by Ruskin to be Ruskin's sort of defence. And Burne-Jones looks at Whistler's work and says, these are very beautiful paintings as sketches. This is a starting point. And Burne-Jones himself would make similar colour studies. They're part of a tradition of training and preparation for making work of art. But Whistler is saying this is enough. My colour studies, my suggestions are actually that sort of the beginning and the end is enough. You don't need to then take it to a high finish. And it's this question of finish. Does it look like it has been worked at? And Burne-Jones's paintings, you know, the way that he is so precise, the way that he creates surfaces, there is an element of finish there, which you don't get in Whistler's work. Because Whistler, if he didn't, you know, if he didn't like something, he would wipe it right back to the bare canvas and then start again. And he wanted the surface of his canvas to be hardly touched by the paint. It was just, you know, it would be, he says it's a breath on the surface of the canvas. It's so delicate. And it's the instantaneous work of his hand. So it's rather than it being about telling a story or about creating a work of art, it is that direct connection between the brain of the artist and the brush and the paint. And that is what, you know, it's that relationship, which is very intimate and swift, which is what Whistler wants to present to the world. No, it's not actually the truth. Whistler worked very hard on his paintings, but he didn't want to show people he was working hard on his paintings. He wanted to give the impression that everything was immediate and unmeditated. So, yes, it is a really big division that happens in Britain. You know, we tend to look to France or America or Berlin or whatever for the new, for the excitement, the avant-garde. But actually what is happening in London in the 1870s is very exciting because you get this direct conflict between someone who writes and speaks for a living, which is Ruskin, and someone who paints for a living, which is Whistler. And Whistler's saying, I don't care what the critics say. What I say about my painting is what matters. And I want it to be immediate and beautiful. It's a really exciting thing to study. I mean, I love coming back to that moment and trying to unpick it. There are no easy answers, actually. Yeah, I found it a really interesting part of your book because it led me thinking of why I admire kind of, I don't know how to generalize, but older art. And I was wondering, why do I, what are the reasons why I prefer to study older art? Older type of art, you know, and one of the answers after reading your book, like, of course, there is, as you said, there are no easy answers, is that I appreciate the skill behind the artwork that is created. You know, how, what was exactly the artist invented, what kind of techniques, like the most popular one can come, let's say, examples are from Da Vinci and Caravaggio, the way they designed light, they used light in their works. And I appreciate other artists in a similar way. And I guess what Ruskin pointed me out is that one of the reasons and criteria that I subconsciously applied to those works were the skill, you know, what is exactly, not only what is depicted, but also what is invented there. I was, yeah, no, I was wondering if you could, I know it is a very hard question to answer, but if you could summarize what would be Ruskin's criteria of what is art, you know, like, if a person wants to come to the world of art and has no education in it, but a lot of passion, what would Ruskin say to look out for in paintings, let's say, you know, or architecture, you know, in whichever way you prefer? Well, I think there's this wonderful moment where he says you are made for enjoyment. You are made for enjoyment and the world is filled with things you will enjoy, unless you're too proud to be pleased by them. And so it's looking for things that make us feel good, not just in a superficial way, but actually draw us into other things which, you know, creates associations with beauty. And it may be through looking at something as simple as a leaf or a landscape or a cloud, or it may be looking at a beautiful combination of colors, or it may be looking at hand skills, as you say. But, you know, the idea of trying to find joy, rather than trying to knock things down, trying to build things up, I think that's what he would look for in art. Whether it's a building or a sketch or a piece of writing, he would always want us to be making it to the best of our ability, being honest in what we're doing and trying to relate it to something which will recognize that there is a great wealth of creativity out there. What he would hate, I think, is sham, is artificiality, is, you know, just creating things which are throwaway, creating things which you know are going to make people feel worse about themselves and worse about the world. And it doesn't mean that you don't, I mean, one of his favorite paintings, and this sounds odd, one of his favorite paintings was Turner's painting of the slave ship, which is a dreadful, dreadful painting of a massacre of enslaved African people being thrown overboard. But for Ruskin, it was worth looking at, even though it was a dreadful painting, it was worth looking at because it made him recognize the value of those people, you know, their humanity, it made him recognize the immensity of the natural world of a storm at sea, and it made him recognize Turner's skill and judgment in painting it. So it doesn't have to be a pretty picture, it can be a horrendous subject, but so long as it leads us to contemplate things which build us up, I think that's the important thing. Not just simply entertainment of looking at something that makes you happy and makes you forget and distracted from your problems, it is something like, as you said, Turner's painting, that you look, you realize the horrors that happen around you, but it elevates you because it shows the humanity of those who suffer and the beautiful way it can be expressed, you know, you go through, you leave the painting with a different mindset. I wanted, before we all jump to William Morris, I have two questions. Perhaps the first one would be, how did Ruskin change you? What was the largest, like the idea by him that follows you, as you mentioned in one of your answers, that there's always Ruskin in your ear, you know, telling you that clothes you wear might not be made ethically or well, like what idea did change you, impact you? I think he showed me that being an art historian is not something esoteric, it's not something that means that you stay in your little ivory tower, that actually being an art historian allows you to talk about really big subjects. You might start with a pretty picture on your screen or in a gallery, but it allows you then to talk to people and question people and then help me and help other people to think about, and I've been very, very lucky. For example, I've worked with artists who have travelled to the Alps, I'm going to work with a group of people who are vulnerable adults to do gardening projects, that's where Ruskin has led me. I've met, I've been able to travel to an extraordinary place called Ruskin Land, which is in the Midlands, and it's a piece of ground that he was given to be beautiful and fruitful, and it's still there, and it's still farmed, and there's a community of people there who make woodworking, they've got woodworking skills there, they gather people from the local community to be in the countryside, but they have orchards, it's a place that isn't just an escape, it's a place that is productive. So Ruskin has led me to all these different places because art history is, you can talk about sculpture on the outside of a medieval cathedral, you can talk about the design of products, you can talk about a drawing that somebody makes in their diary, you know, there's a wonderful organisation which is run kind of on the back of Ruskin, which encourages people to draw, and encourages people to, it's called the Big Draw, and it gets people sometimes out into the landscape, sometimes into a building, but saying you can draw, you know, not just with pencil and paper, but you can draw, you know, on a huge scale, and drawing is a way of getting you to look at the world more intensely. So for me, Ruskin has that, giving me the confidence to be an art historian, and saying this is something worth doing. I think that's fundamental to me, absolutely, because it leads me into all these wonderful places. That's wonderful. And my second question was, if I, for example, transformed and suddenly was replaced by Ruskin, and you could ask Ruskin any question, you know, whatever it could be, I'm wondering, what would you ask him, if you could sit down and have a very brief conversation? Oh, that would be very hard, because there's a bit of me that really wants to understand parts of his biography, but I also think that that would be personal, that would be prying. You know, what he got up to with Effie Gray, yeah, I've written about it, I'm fascinated by it, but I wouldn't necessarily want to ask that to his face. So it would probably be more about what he has enjoyed the most, what gives him the most pleasure, and, you know, just seeing him light up, I suppose, in that way, and thinking about, you know, whether it was a particular piece of carving on a church that he loved, or whether it was a view from the top of a mountain, what is it that he has enjoyed most in his time? Because I think that is the insight into understanding his wanting to bring us out of ourselves and to give us something bigger and better. I wish I could have had such magical powers. But obviously, he had an impact on many other people, including William Morris, as you mentioned. And I was wondering, and your next book is about that. If I'm not mistaken, you mentioned it's coming out in April, I think I saw on your website. It's now coming out in June. So we're just getting the final bits ready for coming out in June. Yes. So it's actually on the 9th of June, which is an auspicious day for members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. So I'm quite happy about that. To our listeners who perhaps haven't heard about William and Jane Morris, who are they and what is the book about? So I've been very lucky to have the chance to write a new biography that brings Jane Morris, who is William's wife, into the centre of the picture. So William Morris was working, he's a generation or two younger than Ruskin, hugely influenced by Ruskin, goes to Oxford, where he reads about Ruskin. But then he becomes a poet. He becomes a designer with his friends. He has enough money, like Ruskin did, to build his own house. And so in that process of building that house, he then decides to work with his friends to make new things for the house. So that might be stained glass, it might be textiles, it might be bookcases and glasses for the dining room. And so all of those things then feed into a business that he and his friends set up, which becomes incredibly successful, and particularly his flat patterning. So his wallpaper and his designs for textiles are still being used all around the world now. I suppose I'm particularly interested in his relationship with Jane, who was also from Oxford. That's where they met when he was doing some artistic work there. But she was a very poor girl. She was from a working class background. She lived effectively in slums. And she met the group of artists around Morris as a teenager and became a model. And what she did was she became a model. And what I'm very fascinated by is how she transformed her life so that she wasn't just this kind of pretty face who we can see on the big canvases, but she was able to converse with these extraordinary writers and radicals, because Morris got involved in radical politics from the 1880s. He was an early socialist. And so she was part of that world as well. And we've been very lucky to be able to read her letters recently. They've been collected by Jan Marsh and Frank Sharpe. So now we can really get inside her life and understand her networks of friendships, what she contributes to the early arts and crafts movement. And also as a woman, how she transcended all the expectations about her. She was a poor girl. Who could have been ditched by these young men and never heard of again. But instead, she was able to marry Morris. I don't know whether she loved him at the time, but she didn't actually have an alternative. You know, you're a 17, 18 year old working class girl. This is effectively a millionaire says, will you marry me? Of course you say yes. In that time, she didn't have any other options. So I'm very interested in seeing that parallel development. You know, when he goes off to Ireland and she goes off to Egypt, there are these amazing stories to tell. And really about friendship and partnership and, you know, those hand skills that brought them together. I think it's, well, I hope people will learn something new about Morris, even if they think they know him already. It is very fascinating how people, as you said, transcend the circumstances, you know, like how they go through all the, when everything is kind of against you, you still achieve something bigger than you are. What was the motivation of Jane Morris? What was pushing her in life? She was very, very intelligent. And she also loved to read, even as a young woman who probably had very little formal education, you get these kind of snippets about her. She said she used to read every scrap of paper that came her way. And so when she was able to start working with these people who are, you know, Morris was a poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who she's modeled for, was a poet. They were doing work that's all associated with California poems, Dante, Shakespeare. You know, this was the background of the artist she was working with. So she is taking that all on board. And also, there must have been a moment when she became engaged to William and she went off to get trained to be a middle class woman, you know, to learn how to run a household, to learn how to play the piano, to learn how to speak French, to learn how to, you know, create her own style of dressing and presenting herself. So I think, from her point of view, she had this, that we know she had the skills, the needlework skills, which were useful. And that helped her to be part of that arts and crafts development. We know that she was really unusual looking, not obviously pretty, tall, amazing dark hair, and not voluptuous in any way, but just real presence. And so all these things, I think she saw this opportunity and grabbed it with both hands. Because she really believed in the possibilities of friendship and partnership, and she developed these, through her letters, we see these amazing loyal friendships coming through. And she was quite reserved. She was aware, I suppose, that she might give herself away. She didn't want to embarrass anybody by, you know, saying anything vulgar or, you know, there is a suggestion, I don't know if you, you know, if you think about something like the story of My Fair Lady, which is George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. And in the film, you know, Eliza Doolittle, this working class girl is being transformed into a duchess. And there is a suggestion, in fact, that that figure is modelled on Jane Morris, because George Bernard Shaw did know the family quite well. But Jane never gives herself away. Eliza Doolittle gives herself away at Ascot, but Jane never does. So I think it's partly because she listened. She must have had a very good ear for language. And she sat in the artist's studio and was looked at and looked at. And she listened all the time. She just took it all on herself. And so when people describe her, after her marriage, they describe her as being queenly, as being noble, you know, very elevated terms for a girl who was nobody. She becomes this figure who sits for being a queen again and again and again. So I've been really lucky to get to know her as well as anyone can. I mean, it's hard. She is a reserved person. I know that. And I don't want to talk, you know, when you're writing biography, there are things you don't necessarily want to dig too deep into. These are real people. You know, they have sensitivities. Yes, they may have been dead 150 years, but it's still it's about approaching people, I guess, with some tact and knowing that, yeah, there are areas of her life, which are complicated. And I might never know the answer to some of those questions. Yeah, no, it is phenomenal. So how much stuff do those people leave after them for biographers like you to reconstruct their image? You know, it's a wealth of information. Perhaps the last question for her for us. I was wondering for with both Ruskin and Jane Morris, William and Jane Morris, the both books that you one you wrote and the one you are in the process of writing, I was curious, what's the hardest thing of writing a biography? And what is the most exciting thing for you to do with the genre of biography? I think the most exciting thing is when you get to meet people that otherwise I wouldn't meet. So, you know, or going to places I otherwise wouldn't go. So I've been able to spend time at Council Scott Manor, for example, which was Jane and William's house in Oxfordshire and talking to curators and looking at the things and having access to a place like that is marvellous. And the same at Brantwood, which is at Coniston Water, which is Ruskin's home in the Lake District, you know, really, I feel often I'm just scratching the surface. And there are people who, you know, almost living in these houses still and really trying to, I do everything through words, they're trying to do things through bricks and mortar and objects, you know, tell stories. So trying to put some of that into the books, I always find fascinating. And just having that privileged access is such a joy. And the hardest thing, and this probably sounds very odd, but the hardest thing is writing about people dying. Because you know, they're going to go, you know, they're going to die. And I still find it, you know, writing about the death of William Morris, it's really tough trying to do that in a way that honoured him and the people he left behind and trying to find the right words. And writing, reading, when Ruskin writes his own autobiography, and it sort of trails off, because you know that his mind has gone, and just reading that, you know, these are people worthy of spending time with. And so when they go, it is, it's still, you know, it's a loss even now. I love one of the last letters that Jane Morris wrote, which she says she's not worried about, you know, growing old, she knows that she'll grow old. That's something she can't be cured of, she said, you know. But there's this moment where she's writing to her daughter. And she says, she's in the garden, she says she's basking in the sunshine like a pussycat. And I love to imagine her like that, even in her old age, just enjoying the warmth and enjoying what she has done. You know, that is a looking back on, on the life she has led. You know, those things are, are still very touching, I find. Thank you so much. I always ask my guests, just to, especially people who wrote biographies, perhaps, if you could recommend someone after reading your book, to which book would be the best place to start Roskin with? And the same with William and Jane Morris, you know, if they, let's say three spots, points of reference for our readers to jump on after reading your books. For Roskin, I would suggest that you try and read the one chapter, The Nature of Gothic, in The Stones of Venice, or to read one of his essays in, I mean, these titles are ridiculous, one of his essays in The Crown of Wild Olive, because they are, that's more about political, you know, the political framework, you know, how we might think differently about politics. So those are the things I would, I would go to Roskin next, because he's not that difficult to read. It's just daunting, because there's so much of him. But William Morris, I would always encourage people to read his early poetry, because it's so unexpected. Before he married Jane, he was writing very exciting, vivid medievalist poetry. It's called The Defense of Guinevere. The Defense of Guinevere is the first of his published editions of poems, because he could write poetry so easily. His friends couldn't believe it. He'd just show up at breakfast time, and there was something, you know, written overnight. They're very vivid, they're quite violent, they're quite sexy, and they're really so, you know, they're so of their moment. In terms of something more general about, about women's lives in the 19th century, I think Judith Flanders has done an amazing job writing about Ben Jones's wife and her sisters. It's called A Circle of Sisters. It's a joint biography. I told you Ben Jones was somebody who knew Jane Morris very well. The Circle of Sisters is, allows you to see several different women's lives in, in that, you know, in that world. And just think about the choices they're making, and family relationships. I think a lot of this comes down to, all of these stories comes down to your family background, doesn't it? You know, how privileged you are, how your parents look after you, what, what you make of your own family, you know, how you navigate those family relationships. Yeah, it's, so I would always go for, yeah, Circle of Sisters is amazing. I would like to thank you so much. I had so many questions, and I'm just aware of our time. Thank you so much for your answers. And I wish you all the best with your next book, which we'll share with, with my listeners and readers. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. If you would like to find out more about Dr. Suzanne Fagin's Cooper and her work, you can find it on my website, which I'll leave in the description of this episode. Once again, I wanted to say, if you are a bibliophile, and if you would like to receive more book recommendations, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which also will be linked in the description of this episode. Thank you once again for listening, and I will see you in the next episode of Hearty Dote Podcast. Bye.