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John Ruskin, (born February 8, 1819, London, England—died

January 20, 1900, Coniston, Lancashire), English critic of art,

architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose

stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, who seeks to

cause widespread cultural and social change.

Early Life And


Influences
Ruskin was born immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. His

father, John James Ruskin, was a wine merchant who had moved to

London and made a fortune in the sherry trade. John Ruskin, an only

child, was largely educated at home, where he was given a taste for art

by his father’s collecting of contemporary watercolours and a minute

and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible by his piously Protestant

mother.

This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical Revival

and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting laid the

foundations of Ruskin’s later views.


Ruskin’s family background in the world of business was significant,

too: it not only provided the means for his extensive travels to see

paintings, buildings, and landscapes in Britain and continental Europe

but also gave him an understanding of the newly rich, middle-class

audience for which his books would be written.

By the mid-1830s he was publishing short pieces in both prose and

verse in magazines. After five years at the University of Oxford, during

which he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill

health from sitting for an honours degree, Ruskin returned, in 1842, to

his abandoned project of defending and explaining the late work of

Turner.

Art Criticism
In 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters, a book

that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him for the

next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the

depiction of Nature in Turner’s landscape paintings. Drawing on his

serious amateur interests in geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin

made it his business to demonstrate in detail that Turner’s work was


everywhere based on a profound knowledge of the local and particular

truths of natural form. One after another, Turner’s “truth of tone,”

“truth of colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,”

“truth of water,” and “truth of vegetation” were minutely considered,

in a laborious project that would not be completed until the

appearance of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860.

This shift of concern from general to particular conceptions of truth

was a key feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin’s first major

achievement was thus to bring the assumptions of Romanticism to the

practice of art criticism. More decisively than any previous writer,

Ruskin brought 19th-century English painting and 19th-century

English art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As he did so, he

alerted readers to the fact that they had, in Turner, one of the greatest

painters in the history of Western art alive and working among them

in contemporary London, and, in the broader school of English

landscape painting, a major modern art movement.

Working in the tradition of the Romantic poetic prose of Charles Lamb

and Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately influenced by the

descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and

the blank verse of William Wordsworth, Ruskin vividly evoked the


effect on the human eye and sensibility both of Turner’s paintings and

of the actual landscapes that Turner and other artists had sought to

represent.

In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and

professional classes of the English-speaking world to the possibility of

enjoying and collecting art. He defined painting as “a noble and

expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself

nothing.” What that language expressed, in Romantic landscape

painting, was a Wordsworthian sense of a divine presence in Nature: a

morally instructive natural theology in which God spoke through

physical “types.” Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural

world, young painters should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart…

having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and

remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and

scorning nothing.”

Despite his friendships with individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would

remain the dominant spokesman for a morally and socially committed

conception of art throughout his lifetime.

NOTABLE WORKS
● “The Stones of Venice”
● “The Seven Lamps of Architecture”
● “Unto This Last”
● “Praeterita”
● “Modern Painters”

AWARDS AND HONORS

● Newdigate Prize

Art, Architecture, And Society


Ruskin had been involved in a major Gothic Revival building project in

1844, when George Gilbert Scott redesigned Ruskin’s parents’ parish

church, St. Giles’s Camberwell. In 1848, newly married to Euphemia

(Effie) Gray, Ruskin went on a honeymoon tour of the Gothic churches

of northern France and began to write his first major book on

buildings, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). Conceived in the

disturbing context of the European revolutions of 1848, the book lays

down seven moral principles (or “Lamps”) to guide architectural

practice, one of which, “The Lamp of Memory,” articulates the

scrupulous respect for the original fabric of old buildings that would

inspire William Morris and, through him, the conservation movement

of the 20th century. In November Ruskin went abroad again, this time

to Venice to research a more substantial book on architecture.

The Stones of Venice was published in three volumes, one in 1851 and

two more in 1853. In part it is a laboriously researched history of

Venetian architecture, based on long months of direct study of the

original buildings, then in a condition of serious neglect and decay.

But it is also a book of moral and social polemic with the imaginative

structure of a Miltonic or Wordsworthian sublime epic. Ruskin differs

from these predecessors both in the poetic power of his prose and in

his distinctive—and widely influential—insistence that art and


architecture are, necessarily, the direct expression of the social

conditions in which they were produced. Here, as elsewhere, the

Aesthetic movement, with its view of art as a rebellious alternative to

the social norm and its enthusiasm for Renaissance texts and artifacts,

stands in direct contrast to Ruskin’s Theoretic views.

The Stones of Venice was influential in other ways as well. Its

celebration of Italian Gothic encouraged the use of foreign models in

English Gothic Revival architecture.Gothic architecture, he believed,

allowed a significant degree of creative freedom and artistic fulfillment

to the individual workman. We could not, and should not, take

pleasure in an object that had not itself been made with pleasure. In

this proposition lay the roots both of Ruskin’s own quarrel with

industrial capitalism and of the Arts and Crafts movement of the later

19th century.

Cultural Criticism
Turner died in 1851. Ruskin’s marriage was dissolved, in 1854, leaving

the former Effie Gray free to marry the Pre-Raphaelite painter John
Everett Millais. Ruskin withdrew somewhat from society. He traveled

extensively in Europe and, from 1856 to 1858, took on a considerable

body of administrative work as the chief artistic executor of Turner’s

estate. He contributed both financially and physically to the

construction of a major Gothic Revival building: Benjamin

Woodward’s Oxford University Museum. In 1856 he published the

third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters, with their penetrating

inquiry into the reasons for the predominance of landscape painting in

19th-century art and their invention of the important critical term

“pathetic fallacy.” His annual Academy Notes (a series of pamphlets

issued by an English publisher from 1855 to 1859) sustained his

reputation as a persuasive commentator on contemporary painting.

But by 1858 Ruskin was beginning to move on from the specialist

criticism of art and architecture to a wider concern with the cultural

condition of his age. His growing friendship with the historian and

essayist Thomas Carlyle contributed to this process. Like Carlyle,

Ruskin began to adopt the “prophetic” stance, familiar from the Bible,

of a voice crying from the wilderness and seeking to call a lapsed

people back into the paths of righteousness.

This marginal role as a disenchanted outsider both legitimized and, to


an extent, required a ferocity and oddness that would be conspicuous
features of Ruskin’s later career. In 1858 Ruskin lectured on “The
Work of Iron in Nature, Art and Policy” (published in The Two Paths,
1859), a text in which both the radical-conservative temper and the
symbolic method of his later cultural criticism are clearly established.

His father’s death in 1864 had left Ruskin a wealthy man. He used his
wealth, in part, to promote idealistic social causes, notably the Guild of
St. George, a pastoral community first planned in 1871 and formally
constituted seven years later. From 1866 to 1875 he was unhappily in
love with a woman 30 years his junior, Rose La Touche, whose
physical and mental deterioration caused him acute distress. During
these years he began, himself, to show signs of serious psychological
illness. In 1871 he bought Brantwood, a house in the English Lake
District (now a museum of his work) and lived there for the rest of his
life.

Legacy

In November 1878 the painter James McNeill Whistler’s action for

libel against Ruskin—brought after Ruskin’s attack on the

impressionist manner of a Whistler Nocturne—came to trial. The trial

made the conflict between Ruskin’s moral view of art and Whistler’s

Aestheticism a matter of wide public interest. Whistler, awarded only a

farthing’s damages and no costs, was driven into bankruptcy. Ruskin

suffered no financial ill effects, but his reputation as an art critic was

seriously harmed. After this date there was a growing tendency to see

him as an enemy of modern art: blinkered, eccentric, and out-of-date.


Modernist artists and critics rejected Ruskin.

His formative importance as a thinker about ecology, about the

conservation of buildings and environments, about Romantic

painting, about art education, and about the human cost of the

mechanization of work became steadily more obvious in the second

half of the 19th century.

The outstanding quality of his own drawings and watercolours

(modestly treated in his lifetime as working notes or amateur

sketches) was increasingly acknowledged, as was his role as a stimulus

to the flowering of British painting, architecture, and decorative art in

the second half of the 19th century.

Above all, Ruskin was rediscovered as a great writer of English prose.

Frequently self-contradictory, hectoringly moralistic, and

insufficiently informed, Ruskin was nonetheless gifted with

exceptional powers of perception and expression. These are the gifts

that the poet Matthew Arnold acknowledged when he spoke of “the

genius, the feeling, the temperament” of the descriptive writing in the

fourth volume of Modern Painters. This unusual capacity to see things


and to say what he saw makes Ruskin’s work not just an important

episode in the history of taste but also an enduring and distinctive part

of English literature.

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