“Ideas of Beauty are among the noblest which can be presented to the human mind,” wrote the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). A vigorous champion of green England’s natural beauty and campaigner against the ugliness of industrialisation, Ruskin inspired the founding of the UK’s National Trust in 1896. The charity’s former director-general and latter-day defender of the beautiful, Fiona Reynolds, is coming to the Big Smoke to deliver the third annual London lecture of the Ruskin Foundation, Ruskin and the Fight for Beauty, at the Geological Society on 6 October. The free event is made possible thanks to renewed sponsorship from Sovereign Films, the production company behind the 2014 biopic Effie Gray, on Ruskin’s disastrous marriage to the teenage Effie. The filmmakers, who supported the previous two lectures in the series, have extended funding to 2023 in celebration of the forthcoming bicentenary of Ruskin’s birth.
