ABSTRACT
In The Elements of Drawing (1857), his drawing manual for amateurs, John Ruskin privileges shading and gradation over line and outline, and moves conceptually in the direction of elevating colour (colore) over drawing (disegno). Arguing that this can be understood as a repudiation of certain visual implications of the ideology of industrialisation, my essay takes the time to unpick Ruskin’s ambiguous presentation of the relations between drawing and colour in his mid-century writings, exploring resonances between Elements and some significant passages in Modern Painters. I argue that in seeking to liberate the Victorian mind from the damaging effects of industrialisation and to make possible an individual encounter with nature, Ruskin destabilises binaries and productively blurs the boundaries between subject and object, and ultimately between nature and the human. Ruskin’s drawing Rocks and Ferns in a Wood at Crossmount, Perthshire (1844) is analysed in these terms. It is as though in real communion with nature all distinctions begin to fall away. However, they do not fully. Love of the diversity of other-than-human life is finally grounded, by Ruskin, in human loss. There are interestingly unresolved implications here concerning gender and sexuality with which the essay concludes.
