Cynthia Gamble

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

🌄🤩🌄

#Ruskin joined the Alpine Club in December 1869. He embodied its highest purpose perfectly: “better knowledge of the mountains through literature, science and art”.
Tomorrow we follow that thread to the Club itself.

#AlpineClubVisit

[Melaine Le Roy @subfossilguy]

@ruskinsociety @couttetlovera @DurrellSociety https://t.co/ykk0WfEmLJ

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

#Ruskin returned to the #Alps not to conquer summits but to understand them. He drew glaciers like the Mer de Glace with extraordinary geological precision, recording their form & movement.

His works are now invaluable records of Alpine glacier loss.

#AlpineClubVisit #Climate

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

#Ruskin deeply admired the Alpine guides & mountain families shaped by the high valleys.

The Couttets were among Chamonix’s great guiding families. Joseph Marie Couttet reached the summit of #MontBlanc in 1821 and later guided Ruskin through the glacier world.

#AlpineClubVisit

[Richard Epstein @rhepstein1]

I confess that my opinion of Ruskin would be higher, had he stuck to fringed gentians.

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

#Ruskin's Flora of Chamouni (1844; facsimile 2024) is an album of flowers he collected, pressed, & named around Chamonix.

His 1882 study of a fringed gentian shows the lessons of the Alps never left him. The same patience, the same scientific precision.

#Botany #AlpineClubVisit

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@gmortonclassics Quite! For Ruskin, the Alps were at once an artist’s studio, a geological field trip, a botanical garden, a meteorological observatory, and a photographic experiment. Anything else? He never did anything by halves …😃

[Grace Morton @gmortonclassics]

Had no idea Ruskin was hauling camera equipment into the Alps in 1849. Slightly absurd levels of overachievement.

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

#Ruskin also photographed the #Alps.

In 1849, with his valet John Hobbs, he made Alpine daguerreotypes, including what is often credited as the 1st photo of the #Matterhorn.

His daguerreotypes were rediscovered by Ken & Jenny Jacobson in Cumbria in 2006.

#AlpineClubVisit

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@thewaronbeauty Wonderful timing😃We'll be seeing this remarkable work at the Alpine Club next week. It's also fitting that, many years after completing its 5 volumes, Ruskin wrote the Epilogue to Modern Painters during his final stay in Chamonix, beneath the mountains that awakened his vision.

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

For #Ruskin, the #Alps were not only peaks and glaciers but also weather, light, cloud, and atmosphere.
In works such as Dawn at Neuchâtel (1866), he studied the sky with the same seriousness he brought to rock and mountain form.

#Clouds #AlpineClub #RuskinSociety

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

Ruskin went to the #Alps with #Turner in mind.

In 1842, among Chamonix peaks & changing weather, he found the vision that would become Modern Painters: art must be judged by truth to nature, not convention.

Turner, The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, 1842, Tate
#RuskinSociety #AlpineClub

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@HorcherF Great point. Ruskin’s authority came from looking as well as making. He drew, painted, and trained his eye through close observation of nature, architecture, and landscape. He belongs to that rare line of critics who could actually do the work...

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

#Chamonix did not merely delight #Ruskin; it helped make him. The #Alps were his schoolroom long before they were his subject.

His father complained that his son knew “the shape of every needle round Mont Blanc” but scarcely where Threadneedle Street was.

#AlpineClubVisit

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

At 15, #Ruskin asked for de Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes as a b'day gift. Through its maps, geology, & observations, he learnt to read mountains with scientific precision & wonder.

That education would find expression in Modern Painters and Deucalion.

#Geology #AlpineClub

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@DurrellSociety Thank you, @DurrellSociety! You’ve been wonderfully welcoming from the start. We truly appreciate your steady support. It’s always lovely to see your logo in our notifications.😍😍😍

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

Aged 14, #Ruskin first saw the #Alps and never forgot them:

"They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking sun."

In #Praeterita he called that moment "the opening of the first page" of the Earth's volume.

#AlpineClub

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

An Alpine welcome to our countdown to the #RuskinSociety's visit to the Alpine Club on 3 July.

#Ruskin first saw #Chamonix as a boy & returned nearly twenty times. We suspect this ibex, surveying its kingdom beneath Mont Blanc, would've met with his approval.

📷 @couttetlovera

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@HorcherF Yes, absolutely. Winckelmann is there in the background too. The wording still feels deeply Ruskinian though, with its moral discipline of attention, presence, & looking for oneself, not through habit, convention, or mediation. The slogan could almost be a modern Ruskin lesson.

[Ruskin Society @ruskinsociety]

@emeraldthiele Yes. Ruskin never lets us forget the sky. To look up is already to begin looking differently, more attentively, more humbly, and with a larger sense of the world than the little screen in our hands.