Introduction

One of the greatest art critics of the Victorian era, the English writer John Ruskin
had a major impact on art evaluation of the 19th century. His personal views on
painting and sculpture (and also architecture), had a huge influence on public taste
and, consequently, on the reputations of many Old Masters and the art
movements which they represented. A devotee of Venetian painting, the English
master JMW Turner (1775-1851), the Pre-Raphaelites, and Gothic architecture, he
believed that most Baroque art - such as the work of the Bolognese School and the
wild Byronesque landscape paintings of Salvator Rosa (1615-73) - was insincere and
therefore bad. He was also a committed social reformer (he gave away all his
inheritance) and believed in the dignity of labour and the importance of
craftsmanship - views which resonated in particular with William Morris (1834-96)
and the English Arts and Crafts movement. His writings on art - most of which were
completed before 1855 - included Modern Painters (published in 5 volumes, 1843-
60), in which he argues that the artist's main role is "truth to nature"; The Seven
Lamps of Architecture (1849); and The Stones of Venice (published in 3 volumes,
1851-3). In all of his books and articles, he stressed the connections between nature,
art and society. Despite an unhappy personal life and an old age marred by illness,
Ruskin is remembered as one of the great commentators on both the aesthetics and
the history of art.
 
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A precocious, highly-strung boy, the son of John James

Ruskin, a wealthy wine merchant, he developed a natural
talent for drawing and watercolor painting. Encouraged
(though also watched over) by his parents, he explored the
local Dulwich Picture Gallery and travelled with the family
around Europe, viewing many sites of the Grand Tour. In
1836, he began his studies at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and began
collecting works by Turner. Much later in life he returned to
Oxford as Slade Professor of Fine Art (1869-77 and 1884).

After Oxford, Ruskin divided his time between trips to Italy

(developing a deep interest in botany en route), Paris
(where he studied paintings by Perugino, Titian, and others,
at the Louvre) and his treatise Modern Painters, whose first
volume appeared in 1843, to great acclaim. In 1845, he
toured Europe without his parents. In Italy, he was
particularly impressed with the sculpture of Jacopo della
Quercia (c.1374-1438), as well as the paintings of Fra
Angelico (c.1400-55) and Giotto (1267-1337) at the museum
of San Marco in Florence, and those of Tintoretto (1518-94)
in the Scuola di San Rocco. Much of this research was used
in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), which
focused on 14th century Proto-Renaissance and 15th
century Early Renaissance painting. (Note: the term
"Renaissance", used to describe the European cultural
rebirth which originated in quattrocento Florence, was first
coined by the 19th century French historian Jules
Michelet 1798-1874.)

An unsuccessful marriage in 1848 to Euphemia Chalmers

(Effie) Gray followed, as did his next masterpiece - this time
on medieval architecture - entitled The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849) - the title derives from the seven moral
attributes that Ruskin considered inseparable from all
architecture: sacrifice, truth, beauty, power, life, memory
and obedience. In 1851, the first volume of his third book
- The Stones of Venice - appeared, while at the same time he
encountered the group of English painters known as the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: William Holman Hunt (1827-
1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Edward Burne-
Jones (1833-98) and John Everett Millais (1829-96) who
later married Ruskin's wife. Believing them to have been
unfairly treated by the critics, Ruskin wrote several articles
in their support.

During the 1850s, he wrote three more volumes of Modern

Painters (1852-60) - including a rather disjointed fifth
volume on the Renaissance in Venice, looking at Venetian
Altarpieces (c.1500-1600) and works by Paolo
Veronese (1528-88) - as well as regular reviews of the
annual Royal Academy exhibitions, under the title Academy
Notes (1855–59, 1875). These reviews proved highly
influential, and were capable of making or breaking the
reputation of the artists reviewed. Two artists heavily (and
unfairly) criticized by Ruskin were the visionary landscape
painter John Martin (1789-1854) and the classical subject
painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912).

Despite these varied activities, from the late 1850s onwards,

Ruskin's chief concerns (aside from acting as executor of
Turner's will, and cataloging many of his works) were
natural history, economics and sociology. The final point of
his career in fine art occurred in 1869 when he was elected
the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, where he became
a highly popular lecturer and also established the Ruskin
School of Drawing & Fine Art (1871). He also continued his
own intermittent career as an artist, exhibiting
his watercolour painting at the Fine Art Society (1878) and
at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (1879), in
London.

In 1877, in a public letter, Ruskin launched a scathing

criticism of the American Impressionist-style painter James
McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), whose painting Nocturne in
Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875, Detroit Institute
of Arts), he described as "flinging a pot of paint in the
public's face". Whistler sued him for libel, winning damages
of one farthing, with costs split between the parties. In the
event, Ruskin's costs were paid by donations from the
public, while Whistler went bankrupt, but neither party
emerged from the episode with much credit.

Except for his Oxford lectures, a number of essays, articles

and a delightful volume of autobiography,
entitled Praeterita (1885-9) (Of Past Things), his last thirty
years were marked by a declining mind, and ill health.
Paradoxically, while his early brilliance had earned him the
reputation of a dilettante, his last three decades witnessed
the zenith of his reputation as an art critic. By the 1890s, he
was seen as virtually infallible.

Ruskin's Ideas on Art

Ruskin expressed a wide range of opinions on painting,

sculpture, architecture and the crafts movement. One which
stands out, is his strong belief in the connection between
nature and art. He believed passionately that the task of an
artist was to observe nature and express it - free of any rules
of composition - rather than invent it in his studio. He
regularly emphasized his opposition to artists who favoured
"pictorial convention" at the expense of "truth to nature".
Thus he admired the Pre-Raphaelite commitment to
'naturalism', and praised Gothic architectural design -
whose revivalist idiom was extremely popular in Victorian
architecture - for its reverence for 'natural forms'.

But Ruskin went further, arguing that nature and God are
one and the same; that truth, beauty and religion are
inextricably linked; that "beauty is a gift of God". He
believed, for instance, that Venetian art had deteriorated
because artists were losing their faith in Christ, and
worshipping transient things like sensuality and money.

Reputation and Legacy

Ruskin's interests covered the arts, the natural sciences,

economics and politics. Their very breadth, however,
possibly encouraged by a nervous inability to concentrate,
caused problems. His writings on art, for instance - while
ahead of his time - were both unsystematic and limited in
outlook. His stubbornly negative attitude to Baroque
painting (1600-1700) was a case in point - the Bolognese
School led by Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) his
brother Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) and cousin Ludovico
Carracci (1555-1619) being a particular pet hate. Indeed,
Ruskin's detailed knowledge was largely confined to
Italian Renaissance art, 19th century English landscape
painting or 18th/19th century English figurative painting.
He had little to say about Impressionism, for instance,
which burst upon the Paris art world in the mid-1870s.
Nevertheless, his ability to communicate the intense
pleasure that art gave him, boosted by his inspirational
prose and illustration, overcame many of these
shortcomings and made him a revered arbiter of good taste.
Numerous artists have acknowledged their debt to Ruskin,
including architects such as the skyscraper pioneer Louis
Sullivan (1856-1924), the highly influential designer Frank
Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the Bauhaus director Walter
Gropius (1883-1969) and the modernist Le
Corbusier (1887-1965).