Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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
mother.
too: it not only provided the means for his extensive travels to see
which he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill
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
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
descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and
of the actual landscapes that Turner and other artists had sought to
represent.
having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and
scorning nothing.”
NOTABLE WORKS
● “The Stones of Venice”
● “The Seven Lamps of Architecture”
● “Unto This Last”
● “Praeterita”
● “Modern Painters”
● Newdigate Prize
scrupulous respect for the original fabric of old buildings that would
of the 20th century. In November Ruskin went abroad again, this time
The Stones of Venice was published in three volumes, one in 1851 and
But it is also a book of moral and social polemic with the imaginative
from these predecessors both in the poetic power of his prose and in
the social norm and its enthusiasm for Renaissance texts and artifacts,
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
condition of his age. His growing friendship with the historian and
Ruskin began to adopt the “prophetic” stance, familiar from the Bible,
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
made the conflict between Ruskin’s moral view of art and Whistler’s
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
painting, about art education, and about the human cost of the
episode in the history of taste but also an enduring and distinctive part
of English literature.