Expert: Ruskin’s Turner Bonfire Never Happened

Evidence suggests that celebrated art critic John Ruskin didn’t burn a stack of Turner’s work, as he claimed. “Ruskin appears to have been tried and convicted by the standard version of his involvement with the Turner bequest, which characterizes him as the man who destroyed any surviving evidence of his hero’s sex life. Although the bonfire incident has passed into the popular imagination as one of the defining landmarks of Victorian censorship, what evidence there is to support this version of events is surprisingly slight.”