The John Ruskin Prize is the fastest growing multi-disciplinary art prize in the UK. With the values of the radical polymath John Ruskin at it's core, the Prize has a growing reputation for supporting and promoting artists, designers and makers whose work defies easy categorisation.

The John Ruskin Prize was founded by The Guild of St. George in 2012, under the administrative umbrella of The Big Draw supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust. Over the years the prize has honoured painters, printmakers, designers, sculptors, photographers and a wide range of craftspeople.

In his lifetime, Ruskin was primarily famed not as an artist but as a writer, critic, outspoken social commentator and inspiring public lecturer. For him, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and say what it saw in a plain way”. He considered his own drawing and painting - from a geological specimen to an Alpine scene or the architecture of Venice - principally as his route to truly seeing and recording the world or, in the case of the enormous diagrams with which he illustrated his lectures for example, to encouraging others properly to see it and thus to enrich their lives as productive members of society.

The theme for the 2025 Prize, From the Eye to the Hand, is intentionally open to individual interpretation through work which recognises and reveals the crucial relationship between the eye that truly sees and the hand which responds creatively to that sight.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a writer, artist, social critic and philanthropist, someone influential enough to attract praise from figures as varied as Tolstoy, George Eliot, Proust and Gandhi. He championed many of the tenets of the welfare state, and inspired the founders of the National Health Service, the formation of Public Libraries, the National Trust and many other cornerstones of civil society. His influence reached abroad in such areas as women’s education, the minimum wage, child labour, and environmental protection and has served both as a restraining influence on unbridled capitalism and a moral conscience for the nations of the world.

He wrote and spoke on a dizzying variety of subjects: art and architecture, nature and craftsmanship, literature and religion, political economy and social justice. He also worked tirelessly for a better society; the depth and range of his thinking, his fierce critique of industrial society and its impact on both people and their environment, and his passionate advocacy of a sustainable relationship between people, craft and nature, remain as pertinent today as they were in his own lifetime.