Thursday, August 6, 2009

William Gershom Collingwood


After a brilliant academic career at Oxford, where he was a pupil of John Ruskin, he married and settled at Gillhead, Windermere.

He was influenced by John Ruskin, and William Morris, from who he derived a life-long interest in Norse settlement, art and language. His interest in art and Scandinavia prompted his research into the Pre-Norman Crosses of Cumbria and the North of England. In 1927 he published 'Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age', illustrated with his own drawings.

Collingwood lived at Lanehead, beside Coniston Water, about a mile from Brantwood, John Ruskin's home from 1871 to 1900, and was Ruskin's secretary from 1881 onwards. After Ruskin's death, he became Professor of Fine Art at University College, Reading. He founded the Lake Artists Society in 1904, and the Society still has an annual exhibition during August, in Grasmere Village Hall.

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