Ruskin was a compelling educator who began his teaching career as a tutor at the Working Men’s College, London, and later became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University

He campaigned for education for all throughout his life.

Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing (1857) continues to be a popular textbook.

Ruskin was a spectacular public speaker. In addition to thousands of sketches and drawings, The Collection includes the largest number of Ruskin’s Lecture Diagrams, large-scale visual aids created by Ruskin and his associates to illustrate Ruskin’s public lectures.

Ruskin made frequent loans to public museums, and in February 1884 wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton: 'I’m arranging a case at the British Museum, to show the whole history of silica, and I’m lending them a perfect octahedral crystal of diamond weighing 129 carats, which I mean to call St. George’s diamond, and to head my history of precious stones.'

W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin’s St. George’s Diamond, 1884

John Ruskin, Peacock and Falcon Feathers, 1873

John Ruskin, Bird Studies – A Foot