Health

Yesterday I visited the Turner show currently featured at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Titled “J. M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free,” it focuses on Turner’s work in the last 15 years of his life, including watercolors as well as oils, night scenes as well as blinding sunlight, and seascapes as well as fire and smoke (sometimes at the same time, as in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth [1842]). The exhibition’s labels cited John Ruskin frequently as Turner’s first and best interpreter, and as the contemporary critic most presciently alert to Turner’s power and significance. This continual reference to Ruskin made me think of William Morris, and made me wonder whether and how Ruskin’s highly favorable view of Turner may have rubbed off on Morris, given Ruskin’s vital influence on Morris’s aesthetic vision. In so many ways, Morris and Turner would appear to be opposed in their approaches to art. Morris revived the crafts – the “low” arts – as art forms in their own

The Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library invite applications from scholars focused on the Pre-Raphaelites and their general circle, for a one month fellowship. This is an excellent opportunity to work with primary sources such as Rossetti's Lady Lilith (left), and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the U Delaware Library. The Pre-Raphaelite fellowship can come with up to 3,000 dollars and housing. Although the fellowship is intended for “significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers,” applications focused on “the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history” will also be considered. They especially encourage “Projects which provide new information or interpretation—dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists’ works, or studies of specifi