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, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who
seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.
Early life and influences
Ruskin was born into the commercial classes of the prosperous and
powerful Britain of the years immediately following the Napoleonic
Wars. His father, John James Ruskin, was a Scots 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. In his formative
years, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Sell
Cotman were at the peak of their careers. At the same time religious
writers and preachers such as Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas
Arnold, and John Henry Newman were establishing the spiritual and
ethical preoccupations that would characterize the reign of Queen
Victoria. Ruskin's family background in the world of businesswas
significant, too: it not only provided the means for his extensive
travels to see paintings, buildings, and landscapesin Britain and
continental Europe but also gave him an understanding of the newly
rich, middle-class audience for which his books would be written.
Ruskin discovered the work of Turner through the illustrations to an
edition of Samuel Rogers's poem Italy given him by a business
partner of his father in 1833. By the mid-1830s he was publishing
short pieces in both prose and verse in magazines, and in 1836 he
was provoked into drafting a reply (unpublished) to an attack on
Turner's painting by the art critic of Blackwood's Magazine. 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. Neoclassical
critics had attacked the later work of Turner, with its
proto-Impressionist concern for effects of light and atmosphere, for
mimetic inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent the “general
truth” that had been an essential criterion of painting in the age
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 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. By 1843 avant-garde painters had
been working in this new spirit for several decades, but criticism
and public understanding had lagged behind. 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.
Ruskin did this in a prose style peculiarly well adapted to the
discussion of the visual arts in an era when there was limited
reproductive illustration and no easy access to well-stocked public
art galleries. In these circumstances the critic was obliged to
create in words an effective sensory and emotional substitute for
visual experience. 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. Since most of them had
been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, Ruskin
knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that
stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, 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.”
Three years later, in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846),
Ruskin would specifically distinguish this strenuously ethical or
Theoretic conception of art from the Aesthetic, un didactic, or
art-for-art's-sake definition that would be its great rival in the
second half of the 19th century. Despite his friendships with
individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would remain the dominant spokesman for
a morally and socially committed conception of art throughout his
lifetime.
Art, architecture, and society
After the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in
1843, Ruskin became aware of another avant-garde artistic movement:
the critical rediscovery of the painting of the Gothic Middle Ages.
He wrote about these Idealist painters (especially Giotto, Fra
Angelico, and Benozzo Gozzoli) at the end of the second volume of
Modern Painters,and he belatedly added an account of them to the
third edition of the first volume in 1846. These medieval religious
artists could provide, he believed, in a way in which the Dutch,
French, and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries could
not, an inspiring model for the art of the “modern” age.
This medievalist enthusiasm was one reason that Ruskin was so ready
to lend his support to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), a group
of young English artists formed in 1848 to reject the Neoclassical
assumptions of contemporary art schools. Ruskin published an
enthusiastic pamphlet about the PRB (in which he misleadingly
identified them as the natural heirs of Turner) in 1851, wrote
letters to the Times in 1851 and 1854 to defend them from their
critics, and recommended their work in his Edinburgh Lectures of
1853 (published 1854).
But medievalism was even more important in the field of
architecture, where the Gothic Revival was as direct an expression
of the new Romantic spirit as the landscape painting of Turner or
Constable. 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 Words worthian sublime epic.
Ruskin's narrative charts the fall of Venice from its medieval Eden,
through the impiety and arrogance (as Ruskin saw it) of the
Renaissance,to its modern condition of political impotence and
social frivolity. As such, the book is a distinguished late example
of the political medievalism found in the work of William Cobbett,
Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, and the Young England movement of
the 1840s. 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.
Itscelebration of Italian Gothic encouraged the use of foreign
models in English Gothic Revival architecture. By 1874 Ruskin would
regret the extent to which architects had “dignified our banks and
drapers' shops with Venetian tracery.” But, for good or ill, his
writing played a key part in establishing the view that the
architectural style of Venice, the great maritime trading nation of
the medieval world, wasparticularly appropriate for buildings in
modern Britain. The other enduring influence derived, more subtly,
from a single chapter in the second volume, “The Nature of Gothic.”
There Ruskin identified “imperfection” as an essential feature of
Gothic art, contrasting it with the mechanical regularity of
Neoclassical buildings and modern mass production. 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, on grounds of
nonconsummation, 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. Beginning as an art
critic, Ruskin contrasts the exquisite sculptured iron grilles of
medieval Verona with the mass-produced metal security railings with
which modern citizens protect their houses. The artistic contrast
is, of course, also a social contrast, and Ruskin goes rapidly
beyond this to a symbolic assertion of the “iron” values involved in
his definition of the just society. By wearing the fetters of a
benignly neofeudalist social order, men and women, Ruskin believed,
might lead lives of greater aesthetic fulfillment, in an environment
less degraded by industrial pollution.
These values are persistently restated in Ruskin's writings of the
1860s, sometimes in surprising ways. Unto This Last and Munera
Pulveris (1862 and 1872 as books, though published in magazines in
1860 and 1862–63) are attacks on the classical economics of Adam
Smith and John Stuart Mill. Neither book makes any significant
technical contribution to the study of economics (though Ruskin
thought otherwise); both memorably express Ruskin's moral outrage at
the extent to which the materialist and utilitarian ethical
assumptions implicit in this new technique for understandinghuman
behaviour had come to be accepted as normative. Sesame and Lilies
(1865) would become notorious in the late20th century as a stock
example of Victorian male chauvinism. In fact, Ruskin was using the
conventional construction of the feminine, as pacific, altruistic,
and uncompetitive, to articulate yet another symbolic assertion of
his anticapitalist social model. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866,
enlarged in 1873) collects some of the best specimens of Ruskin's
Carlylean manner, notably the lecture “Traffic” of 1864, which
memorably draws its audience's attention to the hypocrisy manifested
by their choice of Gothic architecture for their churches but
Neoclassical designs for their homes.
The dogmatic Protestantism of Ruskin's childhood had been partially
abandoned in 1858, after an “unconversion” experience in Turin. Ten
years later, in a moving lecture on “The Mystery of Life and Its
Arts,” Ruskin reflected on his returning sense of the spiritual and
transcendent. In The Queen of the Air (1869) he attempted to express
his old concept of a divine power in Nature in new terms calculated
for an age in which assent to the Christian faith was no longer
automatic or universal. Through an account of the Greek myth of
Athena, Ruskin sought to suggest an enduring human need for—and
implicit recognition of—the supernatural authority on which the
moral stresses of his artistic, political, and cultural views
depend.
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 30years 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.
Ruskin's appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in
1870 was a welcome encouragement at a troubled stage of his career,
and in the following year he launched Fors Clavigera, a one-man
monthly magazine in which, from 1871 to 1878 and 1880 to 1884 he
developed his idiosyncratic cultural theories. Like his successive
series of Oxford lectures (1870–79 and 1883–84), Fors is an
unpredictable mixture of striking insights, powerful rhetoric,
self-indulgence, bigotry, and occasional incoherence. As a
by-product of the Fors project, however, Ruskin wrote his lastmajor
work: his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). Unfinished,
shamelessly partial (it omits, for example, all mention of his
marriage), and chronologically untrustworthy, it provides a subtle
and memorable history of the growth of Ruskin's distinctive
sensibility.
Assessment
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 totrial. The trial
made the conflict between Ruskin's moral viewof 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 stress on the
moral, social, and spiritual purposes of art and his Naturalist
theory of visual representation were unpopular in the era of
Impressionism, Cubism, and Dada. Gothic Revival buildings became
deeply unfashionable; the architecture critic Geoffrey Scott, in
1914, would dismiss Ruskin's architectural theory as “The Ethical
Fallacy.”
Since then, Ruskin has gradually been rediscovered. His formative
importance as a thinker about ecology, about the conservation of
buildings and environments, about Romanticpainting, about art
education, and about the human cost of the mechanization of work
became steadily more obvious. 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.
Nicholas Shrimpton
