IT WAS supposed to be a “revolution” in painting.

But this portrait of John Ruskin ended up bringing an end to his marriage and eventually he gave it away to one of his friends, who hung it in his Oxford home.

It remained there for about 60 years before being sold at auction to an anonymous owner.

Yesterday the £7m painting made a permanent return to the city after it was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum.

Prof Christopher Brown, the director of the Beaumont Street museum, said he was “absolutely thrilled”.

He said: “It is a very great portrait of a very great person in the history of this country who has a very close association with Oxford.”

The painting was started in the summer of 1853 when Ruskin, his wife Effie and the painter John Everett Millais went on holiday to Scotland together.

Ruskin was a champion of the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite movement, which rejected contemporary art, and insisted that the portrait be painted on the spot despite bad weather and swarms of midges. He expected that the painting would “make a revolution in landscape painting”.

But during the holiday Millais fell in love with Effie and by July 1854 the Ruskins’ marriage had been annulled on the grounds that it had not been consummated.

A year later Millais married Effie and Ruskin’s friendship with him had come to an end.

Millais described finishing the portrait as “the most hateful task I have ever had to perform”.

In 1871 Ruskin gave the painting away to Henry Wentworth Acland, who went on to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and kept it in his Broad Street home.

The painting remained there until the 1930s and the Acland family sold it at auction in 1965.

Colin Harrison, one of the Ashmolean’s Western art curators, said: “Ruskin was looking for the next artistic hero that he could promote but we know all too well how badly that turned out.”

Actress Emma Thompson has written and featured in a film called Effie about the painting which is due to be released later this year.

The painting was given to the Ashmolean under the government’s Acceptance in Lieu of Inheritance scheme, which means the owner left it to the nation rather than pay £7m inheritance tax.

HOW JOHN RUSKIN FOUND FAME

  • BORN in London, art critic John Ruskin first arrived in Oxford when he came to university in 1836.
  • It was at Oxford that he first met Henry Wentworth Acland.
  • He wrote on a wide range of subjects including architecture, literature and botany.
  • He came to prominence with his book Modern Painters and was an early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites.
  • In 1869 he became Oxford University’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art and held the post for nearly a decade.
  • During that time he established what is now the Ruskin School of Drawing which is based in High Street.
  • Ruskin College in Headington, founded in 1899, was inspired by his writings on workers’ education.