WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 5:30 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program hosts a talk by historian Jeremy Melius (University of Oxford / Michael Ann Holly Fellow) that explores the aesthetic and ethical parameters of Victorian critic John Ruskin's watercolor practice. 

 

Free; no registration is required. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events. 

 

According to a press release:

 

Ranging over the sheer variety of Ruskin's visual work—from nature studies to architectural fancies to copies after pictures of the past—Melius focuses on Ruskin's special engagement with his medium, and its ability to suggest things his words could never articulate. The talk, entitled "Ruskin Unpossessed," takes place in the Clark's auditorium and is free and open to the public. A reception in the Manton Research Center Reading Room at 5 pm precedes the program. 

 

Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and art writing who has published widely on figures such as Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou, and on topics such as the history of connoisseurship, the afterlife of Botticelli, and the relation between photography and sculpture. Clark, he is developing a project on Ruskin's fraught relationship with the practice of art history.