Fresh insights into hugely influential Victorian artist and art critic John Ruskin – who constantly defied the expectations of his age – are revealed in a major exhibition at Watts Gallery in Compton.

Thanks to loans from the Yale Center for British Art and others, paintings, drawings, rare books and manuscripts are on display for the first time in a multi-faceted exploration of a great educator.

The full story of Ruskin’s life and legacy is set out in Unto this Last, the lavishly illustrated catalogue to the exhibition that takes its name from his 1860 essay on the economy. Famously, Ruskin championed both Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very different – and equally radical – approaches to art. On show is Turner’s turbulent 1827 seascape Port Ruysdael, with shafts of light in a stormy sky illuminating the choppy waves.

Defending Turner, Ruskin wrote in his 1834 treatise Modern Painters, artists should to ‘go to Nature in all singleness of heart ... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’. The Pre-Raphaelites took this advice to a dazzling extreme in their meticulously detailed approach to painting and, as the exhibition reveals, Ruskin was a brilliant recorder of nature himself.

Ruskin’s 1853 mossy tour-de-force Rocky Bank of a River is exhibited together with a possible downside to painting outdoors – a comic sketch by Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais of them both being attacked by midges.

A highlight of the show is a splendid 1870 watercolour Cupid and Psyche by Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones. Ruskin owned an earlier version of the painting, in which bird-winged Cupid descends into a flowery bower in a swirl of sky-blue drapery.

Credited with influencing the founders of Britain’s Labour Party, Ruskin’s view the cause of labour is ‘the hope of the world’, is illustrated by Walter Crane’s 1895 wood engraving A Garland for May Day.

Beatrice Phillpotts

• On show until May 31. See: www.wattsgallery.org.uk