Robert Hewison

Speaker

Robert Hewison, Lancaster University, UK

With a response by Jorge Otero-Pailos

Ruskin was unusual among leading Victorian thinkers in that he could draw as well as write. In this lecture, I will be exploring the visual dimension in Ruskin’s thought as it developed in response to his experience of European art and architecture, as evidenced by his own drawings.

Biography

Robert Hewison has spent a lifetime working on aspects of Ruskin. His first book, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, was published in 1976, his most recent in this field is Ruskin on Venice: The Paradise of Cities, published by Yale in 2009. He has held chairs at Lancaster and City University London, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and co-curator of the Tate Britain exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites in 2000. He is the author of a series of books on post-war British culture and cultural policy, and has written on the arts for the Sunday Times since 1981. His latest book, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, was published by Verso in 2014.