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Aesthetic Education.
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"The Eye Is a Nobler Organ":Ruskin and
American Art Education
MARY ANN STANKIEWICZ
Although utilitarian justifications for an industrial art education were
effective in introducing art into the common school curriculum in 1870,
another sort of rationale for art education was present in contemporary
writings. This romantic idealist view of art education was a precursor of
the conception of art education that expressed itself in schoolroom
decoration and picture study at the turn of the century. Although derived
from the aesthetic theory of John Ruskin, the English critic, the set of
beliefs about art and art education held by men like Charles Eliot Norton,
James Jackson Jarves, James Mason Hoppin, and George Fisk Comfort
was consistent with the American experience of art. These beliefs emphasized the value of art for the education of morals; close ties between art,
nature, and spiritual experience; the importance of art as a cultural study;
and the role of imagination and genius in art. Ruskin's writings both reflected and helped to create a climate of opinion in which art education
came to be considered a kind of moral education.
Ruskin and Romanticism
The American art experience which sought to grasp the idea behind
perceptual reality, to express love of nature through landscape painting,
and to emphasize the potential moral value of beauty found in landscape
and in art provided a receptive context for Ruskin's work.1 The first
American edition of Modern Painters was published in 1847, just four
years after its appearance in England. As Roger Stein has explained,
Ruskin's aesthetic theories became a virtual gospel of art accepted by leading intellectuals up to 1900.2 Belief in some connection between morality
Mary Ann Stankiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University
of Maine, Orono. She has published in Art Education and Studies in Art Education
and, with Enid Zimmerman, is coeditor of Women Art Educators.
Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 1984
?1984 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
52
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
and art was typical of the nineteenth century, if only because both were
commonly considered kinds of emotions. The American art crusaders had
used their drawing manuals to transmit their belief that the "moral power
of art came from a strengthening of mental and moral powers"3 and, like
many other early advocates of art education, argued that the discipline of
perceiving, then drawing geometric forms would help students learn to
lead moral and virtuous lives. The neoclassical idealism of the art crusaders
emphasized ideal form as the standard of art. Lionello Venturi, however,
has described idealistic art criticism as a synthesis of neoclassical and
romantic trends.4 It was through the work of Ruskin and his American
disciples that the romantic side of the idealist aesthetic came to affect
art education.
Unlike art educators who followed a neoclassical aesthetic, Ruskin and
his disciples placed greater value on the appreciation of ideal content expressed through the language of art than on skills for the visual expression
of ideal forms. Although it was deemed important to learn to speak the
language of art by learning to draw, the chief goal of drawing instruction
was to help the student read the masterpieces of the greatest artists. Part
of the explanation for this emphasis on responding to works of art can be
found in Ruskin's theory of the imagination. Nineteenth-century faculty
psychology postulated a series of mental, moral, and creative faculties corresponding to physical parts of the body. According to Ruskin, the moral
faculty apprehended spiritual order in the sensory world.5 Within this
moral faculty, Theoria and Imagination functioned. Theoria, or contemplation, represented the highest appreciative experience of either art or
nature. Imagination was the intuitive means by which the artist discerned
truth in nature and created a vivid reality from it. In Ruskin's scheme
aesthetic perception was thus a part of creative activity. One characteristic of romanticism was the tendency to identify the critical act with the
creative act. In Ruskin's conception of the imagination, the critic perceiving truth and spiritual order in an artwork was engaged in an imaginative
activity much as was the artist, a point Ruskin exemplified in his own art
criticism which became known for the poetry of its style.
Artists, however, were less common than critics, since, according to
Ruskin, only special minds were "capable of fine, true, and full experience
of beauty."6 Although artistic skills could be cultivated, they ultimately
rested on inherent abilities. Furthermore, the skills of drawing and design
were believed to be affected by the artist's moral character. Those who
created the greatest works of art were presumed to be the most virtuous of
men,7 for only a noble mind could express moral and noble ideas through
the language of art. The critic, using his faculty of imagination to read the
work of art, apprehended not only the artist's personality and moral character, but also the morality of the artist's place and time. Since Ruskin
Ruskin and American Art Education
53
believed that everyone had the potential to respond to these messages, he
devoted his efforts to educating people to appreciate art. Learning to
understand the moral truths embodied in masterpieces of art and to appreciate the fine character of the great artist was a first step toward improving
one's own moral faculty. When the members of a society were more virtuous, their art, reflecting that virtue, would be better. This link between
art and morality was at the center of Ruskin's aesthetic theory.
Another idea central to Ruskin's aesthetic was the appreciation of
natural beauty. Men of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century
responded strongly to the poetic, rugged beauty of nature and sought it
as a source of inspiration. Through travel they explored nature, through
religion they interpreted it, and through science they discovered its laws.
Amateur painters learned to draw and paint the beauty of nature in watercolors, while the neoclassical academies of art followed the traditional curriculum of drawing from casts. During the nineteenth century, landscape
and genre paintings replaced historical compositions as popular favorites,
and Ruskin served as guide to the new art. Like Wordsworth and other
romantics, Ruskin believed that God was immanent in nature. Therefore,
perceiving beauty in nature led one closer to goodness. Ruskin's recommendations for art education emphasized the importance of studying
natural history and drawing from nature as first steps toward the development of taste.8 After students had learned to see spiritual beauty in nature, they would more easily perceive it in art.
Ruskin believed that God revealed both beauty and universal moral
laws through nature and art. The artist, then, should imitate the particulars of nature in the language of art in order to communicate the highest
moral values. Ruskin was not consistent in applying his theories to his own
art criticism; the contradictions he permitted himself made his work open
to a variety of interpretations. Nonetheless, the conception of art as a language which revealed spiritual ideas remained at the core of his work.
When art was conceived as moral, as it was in Ruskin's aesthetic theory,
it was especially suited to becoming part of general education. Ruskin
believed that the right art education could cultivate virtue to a high degree.
He contributed to the broad field of English art education in several ways,
although his ideas on art education opposed those of the officially sanctioned Schools of Design.9 Ruskin was the original Slade Professor of Fine
Art at Oxford, elected in 1869. Prior to his appointment, he had taught art
at the Working Men's College, along with several Pre-Raphaelite artists. In
conjunction with his work at Oxford, he established the Ruskin Drawing
School which was open to both Oxford students and local young ladies,
the latter constituting the majority of the students. For the benefit of his
drawing students, Ruskin arranged collections of original works of art
and copies, often by his own hand. Other collections in the specially de-
54
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
signed cabinets of the Drawing School included photographs, engravings,
magazine pictures, and studies from nature and architecture. Ruskin's goal
in arranging these collections was "to exhibit what is best in each department of art, to illustrate historical development, to stimulate or suggest
the love of natural objects portrayed." 0 These collections and the attendant drawing instruction, unlike those found at South Kensington, were
not designed to teach future artists or artisans; that was never Ruskin's
aim. Throughout his career, he advocated teaching art for general culture,
at all levels of schooling and social class, in an attempt to raise the morality of the masses through an appreciation of art.
Ruskin's other practical efforts for art education included the establishment in 1875 of the St. George's Museum near Sheffield, part of a model
community based on a revival of the medieval guild system. Ruskin
selected specimens of minerals and precious stones, copies and casts of artworks that constituted a collection intended to exemplify the sort of
museum any town might set up for its school children and laborers.
Another, similar Ruskin collection was given to Whitelands, a teacher
training college for women in Chelsea, during the 1880s. This collection
served as a model for collections the young ladies were urged to develop
for use in their own classrooms when they began to teach. Ruskin also
served as president of an "Art for Schools Association," founded in 1883
by Miss Mary Christie, to which his writings had given impetus. The goal
of this association was to supply photographs and engravings of good pictures to schools, an activity Ruskin had recommended as early as 1858.
Ruskin's work for art education united his early interest in art with his
later concern for social reform. In works such as The Political Economy of
Art (also titled A Joy For Ever), Sesame and Lillies, and Fors Clavigera,
Ruskin discussed the cultural and moral value of art. Passages on "Distribution," from The Political Economy of Art, recommended the beautification of schools and the use of pictures in the education of boys, for "the
eye is a nobler organ than the ear; and ... through the eye we must, in
reality, obtain, or put into form, nearly all the useful information we are
to have in this world."11 These passages were frequently quoted by
American advocates of picture study.12 Sesame and Lilies, a pair of lectures on male and female education delivered in 1864, was especially
popular in the United States. Editions were published as early as 1865 and
continued to be reissued frequently through the early twentieth century
and as late as 1944. In the first lecture, on male education, Ruskin described love of literature, art, science, nature, and compassion as virtues
which were, he argued, being replaced in English life by materialism. The
second lecture described women as queens whose powers to guide and
purify should be used in an ideal society. Here, Ruskin articulated the
Victorian view that women were the guardians of higher culture with a
Ruskin and American Art Education
55
special duty to transmit spiritual values to those around them. Fors
Clavigera was originally issued in ninety-six parts or letters, from 1871
through 1884. The first American editions of the complete series appeared
about 1885. These letters-according to Edward Cook, part of Ruskin's
gospel for men-advocated renewal of the guild system. Letter 17, dated
May 1, 1872, set forth two goals for guildsmen: first, devotion to manual
labor in agriculture; and second, devotion to the labor of education for
children. 3 Ruskin believed that education was an important function of
society and that women had a unique role in educating the rest of society
in necessary virtues, one of which was love of art.
Ruskin, born in 1819, passed his formative years during a period
Arnold Hauser has described as the second era of English romanticism,
approximately 1832 through 1848.14 Ruskin made his own contribution
to the literary and artistic romanticism of the age when Modern Painters
was published in 1843. Not only did Ruskin begin his work in art criticism during the period of historical romanticism, but his theories on art
represent those beliefs described as intrinsically romantic by Jacques
Barzun.1 Although all writers on romanticism agree that the term covers
a number of meanings, certain characteristics are generally recognized as
common in all varieties of historical and intrinsic romanticism. These
include belief in an organic unity which transcends the mundane world;
respect for diversity and the unique particular; desire to reconcile opposites through knowledge gained from art; interest in the imagination and in
symbols and myths from past ages. When applied to art, romanticism
implied an art that reflected the spirit of an age and expressed an ideal
reality beyond sensual actuality. Historically, romanticism originated in
eighteenth-century Germany, with roots in German idealism and the revival of medieval German art.l 6 While often considered merely an artistic
movement, romanticism was also a social movement which sought new
social and political forms through artistic invention. Ruskin's desire to
restore medieval values, his theory of the imagination, his love of nature,
his artistic and social criticism all demonstrate his fundamental romanticism.
Ruskin's romanticism differed from the American variety in several
respects. American romantics tended to be more directly influenced by
German idealism. Ruskin did not read German; his acquaintance with
German philosophy came second-hand through Carlyle, Coleridge, and
other English authors who had learned their romantic values from the
German philosophers. Although Ruskin opposed what he knew of Kant
and Hegel, he was like them in believing that art revealed spiritual truth.
Ruskin differed from the Germans in his conception of the relations
between art and morals, ideals and society. In his theory of the imagination, Ruskin connected the perception of beauty with morality, while
56
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
Hegelian idealism distinguished beauty from morality. For the idealist,
moral and aesthetic judgments were autonomous. Ruskin believed that
ideals existed as standards outside art by which the truth or beauty of
any single work could be judged. In Hegelian aesthetics, the ideal was realized as well as revealed through art. Ruskin made aesthetic quality dependent on the quality of society. Idealist theories of art assumed that art
existed in and yet transcended the social context.
German philosophy affected nineteenth-century American education
through the work of Froebelian and Herbartian educators. Hegelian idealism became a force in public schooling in the person of William Torrey
Harris who served as United States Commissioner of Education from 1889
to 1906.17 American schools, under the leadership of Harris, were receptive to idealist influences, including the romantic idealism found in
Ruskin's aesthetic. It seems probable that most classroom art teachers
combined rather than distinguished Ruskinian romanticism and German
idealism.
According to Tony Tanner, American romanticism differed from European varieties in respects other than those already mentioned.' 8 American
romantics were eclectic in their historical revivals, because they lacked a
coherent national artistic heritage. Due to the vastness of the land, the
typical American romantic landscape was unpeopled. Unlike the romanticism found in English literature, American romanticism emphasized the
visual sense over the aural in the perception of nature. This last quality
made Ruskin's keenly sensitive aesthetic vision especially appealing to
American readers. Russel Nye describes American romanticism as "much
more constructive, individualistic, and democratically based" than British
and European models.19 While Ruskin, in his later social criticism, made
art and education subsidiary elements in his program for reviving handicraft guilds as part of a new society, American art educators tended to see
art education as a means to develop virtue within the current democratic
system. Thus Charles Eliot Norton, who saw the same aesthetic poverty
in the midst of material prosperity as Ruskin did, argued that part of the
remedy was the teaching of fine arts in college.2 0
Four Disciples of Ruskin
Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) is perhaps the best known of Ruskin's
disciples. Other art educators who read and frequently referred to Ruskin's
ideas on art included James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888), James Mason
Hoppin (1820-1906), and George Fisk Comfort (1833-1910). Each of
these men contributed to the development of American art education,
although their work was outside the sphere of public schooling.
Ruskin and American Art Education
57
Jarves, eldest of the four and four months the senior of Ruskin himself,
met Ruskin in 1848 while both were living on the European continent.
Like many other Americans, Jarves found Ruskin's ideas on art, political
economy, and morality congenial. Art Hints, first published in 1853, and
Art Studies included both direct and indirect quotations from the English
critic. Jarves was often considered the second strongest influence on
American art theory after Ruskin. The success of Ruskin's books in the
United States paved the way for ready interest in all three of Jarves's
books; The Art-Idea was published in 1864. Jarves contributed to American art education through his art criticism which made readers familiar
with his theories on art and through his work as an art collector and an
advocate of museums. His various collections of paintings, Venetian glass,
and textiles were acquired by Yale, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Metropolitan Museum, and Wellesley College.
Jarves, like other disciples of Ruskin, sought to understand civilization
by studying art. In The Art-Idea Jarves tried to trace the historical progress
and aesthetic development of art by showing how climate, traditions, religion, and governments all affected art. He argued that art was the spiritual side of civilization. In the United States, according to Jarves, material
needs were being met through advances in science, but the spirit was going
hungry. Art was necessary to meet spiritual hunger for beauty, to influence the religious faculty, to refine the people, to expand and exalt intellect, and to correct manners and morals. Earlier Jarves had written, "Art
education, rightly conducted, is not only a delight, but a source of virtue."2 I He even asserted that art culture tended to prevent crime and
improve physical appearance. Although Jarves believed that only a few
were given the talent necessary to become great artists, he thought that
most people spontaneously displayed levels of taste that were in proportion to their good character. Art education, therefore, should not aim to
develop artists by teaching technical knowledge of art, but should refine
the natural perceptive and appreciative powers by teaching aesthetic rules,
the intellectual and moral principles of art. Jarves recommended that
museums and collections of art in public buildings should have priority
over the establishment of schools of design so that people could see fine
art. While young children should be taught to draw, paint, and model,
these skills of the hand should be united with perceptual skills and the
development of taste.22 Jarves suggested that parents use displays in shop
windows as "primary lessons in art" for children, instilling love of beauty
through the ideas, fancies, hints, and impressions gained from tasteful
arrangements of goods.2 3 Jarves also recommended that professorships of
art history and theory be established in advanced seminaries (secondary
schools) and colleges.
58
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
James Mason Hoppin, a self-described "Ruskinite,"24 not only advocated collegiate art education in the history of art, but in 1879 resigned his
chair at the Yale Divinity School to become professor of the history of art
at the Yale School of Art, a position he held for twenty years. In addition
to teaching, Hoppin wrote on art, its history, and its role in general education. Although Hoppin moved away from Ruskin's theories in his later
writings, he continued to acknowledge his debt to Ruskin as one who had
faith in spiritual laws of beauty.2 5 In his address at the dedication of the
Yale art building in 1866, Hoppin presented seven goals for the study of
aesthetic culture that reveal him as an adherent of romantic idealist aesthetic: (a) to promote intellectual development, (b) to help people see the
beauty of truth while freeing them from materialism, (c) to serve as an
ethical influence, (d) to present truth in a form different from science and
so counteract the trend toward a narrow education, (e) to cultivate the
perceptive powers of the mind, (f) to aid in the study of other subjects,
(g) to foster kind feelings and good manners.26 Hoppin introduced his
views on art education to public school art teachers in 1893 when he
addressed the National Education Association at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While recommending the adoption of French methods for
teaching drawing, Hoppin justified art education as a means to cultivating
taste and to ennobling the mind so that it could rise above the material to
spiritual ideas of beauty and truth.2 7
Charles Eliot Norton, first professor of history of art at Harvard, was a
close personal friend of Ruskin and editor of an American edition of his
works. Norton first met Ruskin in England in 1855. Jarves had given his
compatriot a letter of introduction so that Norton could see Ruskin's
collection of Turner paintings. The following year, Ruskin and Norton met
again, and their friendship developed. According to Stein, Ruskin described
Norton as his "first real tutor," indicating the reciprocal nature of their
friendship.28 Norton's ideas on art education were similar to those of
Hoppin. Indeed, the two authored a pair of articles for Forum. In the first,
Norton defined the fine arts as
the only real test of the spiritual qualities of a race, and the standard by which ultimately its share in the progress of humanity must
be measured. For they are the permanent expression of its soul; of
the desires and aspirations by which it has been inspired.... The
best that a people has to express will be expressed in its fine arts,
and there is no other source of noble works of the fine arts than
noble character.29
In Norton's analysis, the desires and aspirations of the soul were expressed
in forms of beauty created by the imagination. Hoppin followed Norton's
article with his own discussion of art in popular education a few months
later. Norton's most direct contribution to art education was made in his
lectures to the young men of Harvard. In these lectures, he argued that
Ruskin and American Art Education
59
fine arts expressed the moral and intellectual state of past cultures, a state
far from the barren American culture which starved the creative spirit.30
Norton wanted to refine the sensibilities of his students so that they would
develop morally while learning to understand culture through the study of
art.
The fourth of these disciples of Ruskin is the least well known, but like
the others, he advocated a romantic idealist art education. George Fisk
Comfort first read Ruskin as an adolescent art student in upstate New
York.31 Inspired by what he read, Comfort considered becoming an artist,
but instead turned to teaching art and languages. After spending several
years in Europe during the 1860s, Comfort returned to the United States
where he taught aesthetics at Allegheny College, was a founding trustee of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and established the Syracuse University
College of Fine Arts, where he served as dean and professor of aesthetics
from 1873 through 1893. Comfort advocated an "esthetic education" that
balanced the history, theory, and practice of art, as Hoppin also recommended.32 Like Hoppin and Jarves, Comfort saw art as an expression of
spiritual ideals. Like Norton, he saw art as an expression of the moral tone
of an age. Comfort also believed that an aesthetic education was especially
beneficial for women, because it suited their special nature.33
Although there is no evidence that these four men made any concerted
effort to coordinate their notions of art, they shared beliefs about art and
art education articulated in the writings of John Ruskin and prevalent in
nineteenth-century America. They believed that art was a spiritual expression which rose to its highest levels when created by noble men to express
high moral sentiments. They argued that the faculty of imagination was
a powerful force in the creation of art. They asserted that the spiritual
quality of beauty could be found in nature, the basis of art. According to
them, education, including art education, should be moral training. Both
the artist's character and the quality of a culture were revealed through
art. Although the true artist was born a genius, anyone could cultivate aesthetic sensibilities. These beliefs formed a rationale for their recommendations for the development of collections of examples or reproductions of
the best art of past ages and for their emphasis on the importance of art
history and theory in the development of art appreciation. Due to the
efforts of men like Jarves, Hoppin, Norton, and Comfort, the generation
of art educators teaching at the turn of the century were ready to extend
the romantic idealist aesthetic to public schools.
The Ruskinian Aesthetic and Public School Art
During the 1890s, a movement to decorate schoolrooms with photographs and casts of art masterpieces caught the interest of American edu-
60
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
cators. The first stirrings of the movement had been felt in the Boston area
in 1870. Casts of antique sculpture were purchased with private subscriptions and placed in the hall of the Girls' Normal and High School building
on West Newton Street. Although overshadowed by the work of Walter
Smith for industrial art education, the movement to promote art culture
through schoolroom decoration re-emerged with the organization of the
Boston Public School Art League in May 1892. The work of the league,
led by Salem artist Ross Turner, was taken up in other cities across the
nation. In the spring of 1896 an exhibition of works suitable for schoolroom decoration was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Walter Goodnough, in his introduction to the catalogue, described the
spread of schoolroom decoration as having its impetus in Ruskin's similar
work in England.34
The schoolroom decoration movement sponsored by the school art
societies of the 1890s created an environment for the later picture study
movement, which clearly demonstrated the shifting focus of the curriculum from art processes to art ideas. Writers on picture study often quoted
from Ruskin.35 When Henry Turner Bailey published the results of his
symposium on picture study in the February 1908 issue of School Arts,
the drawing supervisors of both Milwaukee and Springfield, Massachusetts,
quoted from Ruskin to justify the value of the new trend.36 Half the
fourteen respondents displayed a Ruskinian aesthetic, emphasizing morals,
imagination, and nature to explain why they favored picture study. When
Estelle Hurll listed the laws of composition for students of pictures, she
borrowed from Ruskin's Elements of Drawing five of his nine laws of
arrangement.37 Both Mabel Emery and Bailey included Ruskin's works
among the reference books they recommended for schools.38
Direct and indirect quotations from Ruskin sprinkled the pages of early
issues of the Applied Arts Book, later to become School Arts. Applied
Arts Book authors identified themselves as "guild-craftsman," raising the
question of how much the work of Ruskin and William Morris had influenced the founding of the journal. Ruskin's works were frequently cited
as references for specific drawing tasks. A strong emphasis on the importance of nature study and the value of natural beauty echoed Ruskin's
view of nature as the first art teacher. Another influential journal of the
picture study movement was The Perry Magazine, published from 1898
through 1906 by the manufacturers of Perry Pictures, half-tone reproductions of great paintings and works of sculpture and photographs of famous
men, women, and historic places. The recognition accorded Ruskin by art
educators of the day is demonstrated in the February 1900 issue. Ruskin
had died January 20, 1900. The Perry Magazine published a photograph
of Ruskin without eulogy or flowery tribute, merely his dates beneath the
picture. This silent tribute illustrates that by the time of his death Ruskin
Ruskin and American Art Education
61
was well known to art educators.
Both schoolroom decoration and picture study took a moral view of
art. Picture study especially was grounded in the belief that art was a language that young people could be taught to read. Adherents of both movements believed that great artists were exemplars of high moral character,
that exposure to works of fine art could help students develop spiritual
and practical virtues. Like Jarves nearly half a century earlier, picture
study writers described fine art as an influence for order, cleanliness, love
of home and family. Just as Ruskin connected his art criticism to social
criticism, American art educators were trying to connect art study with
social improvement or adjustment, as it was then termed. Picture study
was even seen as one means to reach immigrant children who would learn
necessary American virtues by reading the language of great art.39 As Elsie
May Smith wrote in her article in School Arts, "Picture study will foster
good taste, not only in pictures, but in all the departments of life. It will
give that broader and finer outlook which enables one to discern the meaning and worth of spiritual influences; it will insure that sensitiveness which
makes one alive to the best which life has to give."40 Laura Hagerty, echoing Ruskin's theory, argued that God spoke through masterpieces of artistic genius, trasmitting a message best understood through the emotions
and imagination.41 Truly, the eye that learned to perceive truth and
beauty in art was a noble organ.
Although David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot describe the turn of the
century as the period when school leadership was changing from "the parttime educational evangelists who had created the common school system
to a new breed of professional managers ... who were reshaping the
schools according to canons of business efficiency and scientific expertise," such a radical change did not occur overnight.42 As late as 1932,
Willard Waller could refer to schools as "museums of virtue," ultraconservative institutions that kept alive the moral principles and ideals most
adults had abandoned.43 The advocates of schoolroom decoration and picture study sought to make the school an actual museum of virtue, housing
reproductions of those works of great art that could best inspire manners
and morals in the children of the masses. Given the conservative nature of
public schooling, it is hardly surprising that Ruskin's aesthetic theories
entered schools when they had ceased to stimulate leading intellectuals.
Most of the leading advocates of picture study and schoolroom decoration
were not male intellectuals but women. Told by Ruskin and other Victorian writers that they had a duty to refine the lives of those around them,
women took an active role in organizing school art societies to promote the
distribution and study of pictures. The growing feminization of teaching,
coupled with women's role as guardians of culture, contributed to the
development of the conservative museum of virtue.
62
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
The notions of aesthetic culture presented to upper-class Americans
through the work of Jarves, Hoppin, Norton, and Comfort in collegiate
and museum art education provided a rationale for public school art education through exposure to reproductions of fine art. Under the romantic
banner of an aesthetic theory derived from Ruskin, picture study and
schoolroom decoration were justified as means to unite beauty with imagination and truth, to teach ethical doctrines, to promote practical virtues,
and to improve society. Because aesthetic taste was considered part of the
moral faculty, followers of Ruskin expected that art instruction would
improve character and conduct. While Ruskin had made art and education
merely one part of his larger scheme for social reform, American art educators argued, often more simplistically than the master, that seeing reproductions of great pictures would bring the child's mind into communion
with great artists of the past, inspiring the child to emulate their moral
excellence. For most picture study and schoolroom decoration advocates,
educating the child's eye for art was inseparable from perfecting morality
and improving social adjustment.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
For analyses of American art and aesthetic attitudes, see Neil Harris, The
Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1790-1860 (New York:
George Braziller, 1966); and Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience, 2nd ed. (New
York: Harper & Row, 1979).
See Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). The phrase "gospel of art"
is used to describe Ruskin's works by Edward T. Cook, Studies in Ruskin: Some
Aspects of the Work and Teaching of John Ruskin (1890; Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), pp. 33-35.
Peter C. Marzio, The Art Crusade: An Analysis of American Drawing Manuals,
1820-1860 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1976), p. 57.
Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964),
p. 187.
Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art: An Analysis of Ruskin's Esthetic
(New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1932), p. 117.
Ladd, Victorian Morality, p. 108.
The use of masculine forms here is deliberate, reflecting the typical nineteenthcentury attitude that artists were men.
See John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderburn, vol. 16 (London: George Allen, 1905), pp. 144-45.
For a discussion of Ruskin's lack of influence on the British governmental
schools of art, see Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (New York: American Elsevier Publishing, 1970), pp. 265-68.
Cook, Studies in Ruskin, pp. 119-20.
Ruskin, Works, vol. 16, pp. 90-91.
See Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1895-96, vol. 2
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879), pp. 1370-72.
Ruskin, Works, vol. 27, p. 296.
Ruskin and American Art Education
63
14. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 4 (New York: Vintage Books,
1975), pp. 109-11.
15. Barzun distinguishes intrinsic romanticism from historical romanticism; the first
is a trait of Western man which reappears from time to time, while the second
is a cultural movement occuring at a particular place and time. See Jacques
Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 94-95. For other analyses of intrinsic and historical
romanticisms, see A. O. Lovejoy, "Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of
Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 3 (June 1941): 257-78; Rene
Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," in Concepts of
Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Kenneth M. Clark, The
Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books, 1964); and Franklin L. Baumer, "Romanticism (ca. 1780-ca.
1830)," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 4, ed. Phillip P. Wiener (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), pp. 198-204.
16. See William Vaughan, Romantic Art (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978); also by the same author, German Romanticism and English Art (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
17. See Frederick M. Logan, Growth of Art in American Schools (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1955), pp. 85-94; and Stephen Mark Dobbs, "The Paradox of
Art Education in the Public Schools," ERIC Document Reproduction Service
No. ED 049196 (1971), p. 8.
18. Tony Tanner, "Notes for a Comparison between American and European
Romanticism," Journal of American Studies 2, no. 1 (April 1968): 83-103.
19. Russel Blaine Nye, Society and Culture in America, 1830-1860 (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 23.
20. See Charles Eliot Norton, "Some Aspects of Civilization in America," Forum 20
(1896): 641-51.
21. James Jackson Jarves, Art Studies: The "Old Masters" of Italy; Painting (New
York: Derby and Jackson, 1861), p. 11.
22. James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea, reprint ed., ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr.
(1864; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960),
p. 152.
23. Jarves, Art-Idea, pp. 257-58.
24. James Mason Hoppin, Old England: Its Scenery, Art and People, 9th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887), p. 43.
25. Stein, John Ruskin, p. 239.
26. James Mason Hoppin, "The Relations of Art to Education," The New Englander
25 (October 1866): 601-17.
27. James Mason Hoppin, "Methods of Art Education for the Cultivation of Artistic
Taste," in Proceedings of the International Congress of Education of the World's
Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 25-28, 1893, 2nd ed. (New York: National Educational Association of the United States, 1895), pp. 476-86.
28. Stein,John Ruskin, p. 59.
29. Charles Eliot Norton, "A Definition of the Fine Arts," Forum 7 (1889): 39.
30. Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), pp.
124-25.
31. "Biographic Sketch of George F. Comfort," Comfort Family Papers, RG 13,
Syracuse University Archives, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse, New
York.
32. Compare George Fisk Comfort, "Esthetics in Collegiate Education," The Methodist Quarterly Review (October 1867): 572-93, with Hoppin, "Relations of
Art."
33. See George Fisk Comfort and Anna Manning Comfort, Women's Education and
Women's Health: Chiefly in Reply to "Sex in Education" (Syracuse, N.Y.: T. W.
Durston, 1874), pp. 73-76.
64
Mary Ann Stankiewicz
34. Report of the Commissioner, 1897, p. 1375.
35. See Ross Turner, "The Schoolhouse Beautiful," The Perry Magazine 2, no. 5
(January 1900): 205; and Anna V. Horton, Teacher's Manual and Study Outlines for the Art Appreciation Collection (Akron, Ohio: The Art Appreciation
Publishing Co., 1921), p. 5.
36. Henry Turner Bailey, "Picture Study," The School Arts Book 7, no. 6 (February 1908): 483-99.
37. Estelle Hurll, How to Show Pictures to Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1914), pp. 18ff.
38. See Mabel S. Emery, How to Enjoy Pictures (Boston: Prang Educational Company, 1898); and Henry Turner Bailey, "The School Library," The School
Arts Book 3, no. 2 (October 1903): 77.
39. See Sarah Justine Bristol, "The Influence of Pictures," The School Arts Book 5,
no. 6 (February 1906): 432-35. It is ironic that the pictures used were, like the
children, generally of European origin.
40. Elsie May Smith, "Picture Study in the Schools," The School Arts Book 10,
no. 7 (March 1911): 503.
41. Laura Hagerty, "Picture Enjoyment," The School Arts Book 6, no. 7 (January
1907): 385-87.
42. David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 106.
43. Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching, reprint ed. (1932; New York: Russell
& Russell, 1961), p. 34.