The Maas Gallery has recently sold a watercolour by William Gershom Collingwood (1854-1932) showing John Ruskin in his turret study at his home Brantwood, to the Brantwood Trust.
Ruskin bought Brantwood, sight unseen, in 1871. He had visited the lakes since he was a boy of five, and wanted to retire there. He expanded and renovated the house, adding the turret to give spectacular views over Coniston Water, north, south and west.
Collingwood met Ruskin in 1872 at Oxford, and visited him at Brantwood in 1873, becoming his full-time assistant and moving nearby after his marriage in 1883. He wrote a biography of the great man in 1893, in which Collingwood recalled how, upon being welcomed at Brantwood, the guest would have been ‘ushered up a narrow stair, which betrays the original cottage, into the “turret room”. It had been the professor’s until after his illness, and he papered it with naturalistic pansies, to his own taste, and built out at one corner a projecting turret to command the view on all sides, with windows strongly latticed to resist the storms’. In the last fifteen years of Ruskin’s life, whilst his friends divided into those who were devoted and those who were indifferent, Collingwood wrote: ‘All that I now remember of many a weary night and day is the vision of a great soul in torment and through purgatorial fires the ineffable tenderness of the real man emerging with his passionate appeal to justice and baffled desire for truth. To those who could not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain it was nothing but a horrible or grotesque nightmare. Some, in those trials, learnt as they could not otherwise have learnt to know him, and to love him as never before’. Collingwood designed Ruskin’s gravestone.
Howard Hull, the Director of Brantwood today, has pointed out that Ruskin made changes to Brantwood, which means that the earliest this picture can be dated is 1885, the year that Ruskin made over Brantwood to the Severns, on the condition that he could live there until his death. Given the relatively quick decline in Ruskin’s faculties (once diagnosed as senile dementia) in the late 1880s, the latest date for the picture would be 1889. Ruskin sports a fairly modest beard, which would indicate a date of the mid 1880s, after which his beard grew long. Ruskin is leaning out of the window of his famous turret room, surrounded by the generations that would come to inherit Brantwood; Arthur Severn is in the top left window, in his studio, while the figure in the top right hand window is probably his wife Joan, Ruskin’s cousin. The couple on the road could be their children Lily, the eldest daughter, who owned a parasol, and her brother. However, Collingwood was not a great fan of the Severns, and these figures could be any two of the regular guests: Holman Hunt, A.W. Hunt, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Creswick, George Allen, Walter Crane, Kate Greenway or Sydney Cockerell, to name a few. This picture was first owned by Dr John Kendall of Coniston, friend and physician to both Ruskin and Collingwood.
