Seminar: Christine Bates (York/Jena), 'Volcanic Haze and Industrial Gloom: Ruskin, Goodwin'

We're are delighted to share the details of our upcoming seminar, which will take place on Wednesday 14 October from 5pm to 7pm BST. The event will be held in HG/09 (Heslington Hall) and online.

We are delighted to welcome Christine Bates, a doctoral researcher at the University of Jena and associate member of the University of York. Her paper is entitled 'Volcanic Haze and Industrial Gloom: Ruskin, Goodwin and the Aesthetics of Atmospheric Indistinction':

When Albert Goodwin exhibited A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1883) at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1884, John Ruskin dismissed it as a ‘ghastly sunset’. He read its dissolution of smoke, cloud and afterglow into a single agitated wash as evidence of his former protégé’s failing moral vision. This talk reads the same indistinction as the picture’s achievement. From late 1883, London’s sky was plausibly altered by two sources at…