“Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang”*…
On this most bizarre of days, an alternative: hours of fun at The New Yorker‘s “Cartoons at Random.”
* “The Witch Doctor”
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As we fight the urge to bury our heads, we might spare a thought for John Ruskin; he died on this date in 1900. Best remembered as the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, he was also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker, and a philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany, and political economy, and in styles and literary forms equally varied: Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century, and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognized as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability, and craft.
You may either win your peace, or buy it:—win it, by resistance to evil;—buy it, by compromise with evil.
– Ruskin, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy. Lecture at Tunbridge Wells, February 16, 1858
