John Ruskin English writer, art critic, Victorian period intellectual (1819-1900)

Writer, art critic, champion of socialism, John Ruskin put everything he had into his beliefs, including most of his fortune. When his father left him a large sum of money, he gave most of it away to art museums and charities.

Ruskin was born in London, England, on Feb. 8, 1819. His father was a wealthy wine merchant, and both of his parents devoted much time to his education. In 1836 he left home to go to Oxford, where he won a prize for poetry. He graduated in 1842.

Early in his career Ruskin wrote mostly about painting and architecture. The first volume of his 'Modern Painters' series, published when he was 24, redirected public taste. This series and 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' and 'The Stones of Venice' gave the people of Queen Victoria's reign a new interest in art and a new point of view toward it. In his later life he was a professor of art at Oxford.

When Ruskin was about 40 years old, he began to be more interested in humanity and became a social reformer. His writings changed. He began to describe what he thought would be an ideal state of society and how he felt this could be brought about. Ruskin did not champion revolutionary socialism, but he cried out for national education, old-age pensions, and better housing for the working classes. Ruskin's strong feelings about social welfare led him to organize the Guild of St. George--an elaborate social structure in which machines were practically banished. Even though Ruskin knew comparatively little about sociology or economics, his 'Sesame and Lilies', a popular statement of some of his sociological ideas, became very well known.

Even more impressive than the things Ruskin said was the way he said them. He wrote beautiful, clear English--at times very simple and straightforward and at times highly ornate and colored. Altogether he wrote more than 50 volumes. His autobiography, 'Praeterita', tells of his early life. Ruskin died at his home in Coniston, Lancashire, on Jan. 20, 1900.

What was it in William Turner's art that so immensely captured John Ruskin that he almost devoted his life to the advocacy of it? Maybe he saw some of his own transformed desires in the works of the great master of light, surf and rock. I deliberately avoid the modern term sublimation, since this mental state neither was modern nor sublime, but heavy as the stones of Venice he also chose to write about and life surely taught Ruskin lessons as harsh as those ethics of the dust he lectured the young girls at Winnington school about.
Ruskin's life appears to us as a tragic one. Living too close to his Calvinist mother, he probably never really grew up mentally. After an unhappy love affair with Adèle Domecq at the age of 17, he turned to his studies at Oxford, and began collecting pictures by Turner three years later. After graduation in 1842, Ruskin planned a book in defense of Turner, whose work had been mocked by the critics.

The result was "Modern Painters", published in five volumes 1843-60. During those years Turner himself had died, at the age of 76 in 1851. He left behind some 300 paintings and 19,000 drawings and watercolors, that Ruskin cataloged.
In 1848 Ruskin married Effie Gray, who later left him for one of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Everett Millais. Nevertheless, Ruskin wrote a book in defense of this artistic movement, "Pre-Raphaelitism" (1851). Apart from "Modern Painters", his most famous works are "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (three volumes 1851-53). Ruskin detested industrialism and also wrote several essays about social reform that were later collected in "Unto This Last" (1862).
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J.M.W.Turner - John Ruskin (1819-1900)

John Ruskin Francis O'Gorman Paperback - 122 pages (24 June, 1999)

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