With lifelike detail, the wonders of nature
Some say the devil is in the details; others say it's God. The American Pre-Raphaelites subscribed to the latter theory. Emerging in New York in the 1860s and inspired by the writings of the British critic and watercolorist John Ruskin and the English Pre-Raphaelite artists, they painted small landscapes and still lifes with monkish devotion and super-realistic focus. Ruskin's mantra "Truth to Nature" was their motto.
The movement faded away in New York, but it reemerged in the 1880s in Cambridge, where Harvard art history professor Charles Eliot Norton promulgated the ideas of his friend Ruskin and patronized a small group of Ruskin-besotted artists. Now those later American Pre-Raphaelites are the subjects of an engrossing exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum called "The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton , Charles Herbert Moore , and Their Circle." Organized by Fogg curator of American art Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. , the exhibition is loaded with jewel-like wonders of empirical observation and realist technique.
The star of the show is a life-size picture of a single peacock feather lying on a blank, off-white ground that was painted in watercolor and gouache by Moore in 1879-1882. A protege of Norton and friend of Ruskin, Moore taught art history and drawing at Harvard for almost 40 years, and he served as the Fogg Art Museum's first director from 1896 until his retirement in 1909.
Moore's feather is a work of amazing verisimilitude. The white and gray downy stuff at the lower end of the quill; the green, serpentine branches midway with their slightly bristled edges; the central eye-like pattern of concentric ovals in iridescent hues of blue, green and copper: it is all realized so delicately and minutely that the effect is almost like viewing through a magnifying lens.
In his informative catalog essay, Stebbins quotes Ruskin, who valued detail in art "for the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest and least of God's works." Moore's feather illustrates that precept, and so do other works of his in the show, including a pine tree drawn in black ink in which it seems you can make out every needle and an upstate New York winter landscape the size of a paperback book that could have been painted by an Early Renaissance miniaturist.
As for Ruskin, he is well represented in the exhibition by, among other works, a watercolor of a massive boulder in the Alps and a small painting of a single pheasant's feather comparable in delicacy if not intensity to Moore's peacock feather.
Ruskin was not as finicky as the American Pre-Raphaelites. In some pictures, like that of a waterfall in Schaff hausen, Switzerland, he used a loose flickering touch to capture the frothy action. In his architectural studies, too, he combined exactingly detailed observation and lively brushwork. His brown ink study of the elaborately carved ornamentation of a cathedral in Normandy feels amazingly fresh in the way it conveys light and shadow as well as the artist's own avidly attentive presence.
Ruskin's American acolytes can seem dull by comparison. Paintings of architectural sites in Venice and Egypt by Henry Roderick Newman border on photorealistic, but there is an academic laboriousness about them that makes Ruskin look wildly spontaneous. Newman's watercolor painting of white flowers in a Asian bowl set against a lushly patterned backdrop is technically impressive but almost lifelessly sedate.
Among pieces by the show's 10 other artists, however, there are works of magical lucidity. In a watercolor by John William Hill , a New York Ruskinian, two apples and a plum-laden branch set in the sun on a spot of weedy ground are so luminously palpable it is as though you are seeing through the eyes of Ralph Waldo Emerson in a state of transcendentalist ecstasy. A bird's nest containing five spotted pink eggs on a patch of dirt where some white wildflowers bloom by William Henry Hunt , an English painter from whom Ruskin took lessons, is similarly vivid as well as religiously suggestive -- a symbolist vision of new life.
It's not hard to guess why Ruskinian style did not outlast the 19th century. Why devote such painstaking care to recording nature and old buildings when a camera can do it so much faster and easier? Also, the kind of pastoral and antiquarian romance in which the Ruskinians indulged would come to seem increasingly irrelevant to the tumultuous, industrially revved-up 20th century. Nevertheless, relevant or not, their best efforts are still entrancing to behold.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com. 
