‘J after J. Ruskin’: line in the art teaching of John Ruskin and Ebenezer Cooke’

This article compares the place of line in the later art teaching of Ruskin with its role in the ‘South Kensington system’, the national art training scheme developed from the late 1830s under the auspices of the British Board of Trade. It focuses especially on Ruskin’s influence on Ebenezer Cooke, a pupil of his at the Working Men’s College in the 1850s and later, like Ruskin, a vigorous opponent of South Kensington. Starting from a heated public exchange of 1875 involving Ruskin, Cooke and an executant of the government system, William Bell Scott, the article examines Ruskin’s theoretical and practical revaluation of line between the publication of The Elements of Drawing (1857) and of his second drawing manual, The Laws of Fésole (1877–78). It then shows how Cooke combined Ruskin’s earlier analyses of curvature in nature and ornament and his growing sense of outline as a locus of interdisciplinary thought and moral expression with insights into ‘child nature’ gleaned from the pedagogy of Pestalozzi and Froebel and from contemporary British psychology, thus developing an original understanding of, and method of teaching, elementary drawing founded on the ovate ‘general forms’ which in Cooke’s view formed a link between nature and historically and developmentally ‘primitive’ design.