<head1>John Howard Whitehouse (1873-?)

	The most important private Ruskin collector in England. The history of his collecting is extensively detailed in Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood.

	Owing to his career in boys' education, which emerged as early as 1906 and led to his founding of Bembridge School in 1919, Whitehouse might be expected to have taken a special interest in the work of Ruskin's boyhood. Certainly, he combined vocation with collecting at the school by using the Ruskin Galleries, which housed his personal collection, to expose all the boys to art as "an influence in [their] spiritual and intellectual life" and to enlist especially keen students as "boy curator[s]" (Ruskin the Painter, 41, 139; and see Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood, 46-47).

	In strict terms of acquisition, however, Whitehouse's interest in the early Ruskin appears to have been confined to the drawings and the diaries. One reason for narrowing his focus is suggested by Whitehouse's 1938 book, Ruskin the Painter, which begins by "recapitulat[ing] certain main features of [Ruskin's] life as a boy and youth" from Praeterita (p. 13), as if the autobiography inspired a somewhat deadening reverence, its account of the early years beyond question. By contrast, Whitehouse's writing comes alive when appreciating the drawing, an area in which he believed he could make a contribution: "Ruskin's eminence as a writer and social reformer has perhaps obscured the extraordinary service he rendered by his incomparable range of drawings" (ibid.).

	The early drawing captivated Whitehouse "not only for the skill shown by so young a boy, but because [the drawings] show certain great qualities which came to perfection in his later work," and the early diaries evidently interested him for the same reasons (Ruskin the Painter, p. 15). Doubtless because Whitehouse was as "an intense believer in the right of the individual to shape his own life" (Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood, 11), he treated Ruskin's drawing as self-taught: Ruskin's first "real tutor," Whitehouse insisted, "was himself" (ibid., 17). Later, Whitehouse along with Joan Evans would make a similar point about the diaries, declaring at the outset of the preface to their edition of the Diaries, "it is the solitary man who keeps a diary; and Ruskin, though he never lived and rarely travelled alone, was a man doomed to intellectual and spiritual solitude" (1:v). Appropriately, therefore, soon after founding Bembridge School to instruct these ideals of self-reliance and independence of thought, Whitehouse acquired Ruskin's "first sketch-book" (see <MS ??>; see Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood, 38; see Beacon ...).

	Other purchases relatively early in Whitehouse's Ruskin collecting, when he frequently dealt directly with Arthur Severn, included, in 1927, an 1828 map of Scotland and ??? drawings (Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge and Brantwood, 41); and, by 1929 (from an unknown source), two 1835 drawings of Bienne and of Munich (ibid., 45).

	In Ruskin the Painter, drawings of Haddon Hall ([1837], no. 39, p. 61); Melrose, and Stirling Castle ([1838], nos. 41-42, p. 62)
What does Whitehouse say in Beacon article?