The subject, John Ruskin, is regarded as Britain’s greatest, most influential, radical, indeed subversive, pundit on aesthetics and ethics. He called the painter, Collingwood, his aide-de-camp. Collingwood’s sensitive portrait, so obviously painted with love, respect, understanding and sympathy, depicts Ruskin the genius, who, despite the tragedies that have befallen him, looks directly, with immense charity, at the viewer. Ruskin is clearly blessed with an enormous tolerant compassion for the human condition. Ruskin sits in patient resignation, awaiting death, in his favourite chair in his library. The roses reference The Guild of St George (Ruskin saw himself as St George, slaying the ‘dragon’ of industrialised Capitalism, and thus rescuing England from environmental and moral pollution), and Ruskin’s doomed love for Rose la Touche.