John Ruskin

• 1. Introduction

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  John Ruskin was born on the 8th of February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, into a household where a wine importer father read Byron aloud and a devout evangelical mother drilled him through the Bible from cover to cover, start to finish, over and over again. By the time he was a young man, those two forces had fused into something the Victorian age had never quite seen before: a writer who could describe the shadow on a wet stone with the precision of a geologist, then pivot without warning to condemn the entire economic order of industrial England.

  His first published piece appeared in August 1829, when he was ten years old. By the 1850s, his words could make or break an artist's career overnight. By the 1860s, a sitting prime minister's economic orthodoxy was his target. And yet after his death in 1900, his reputation spent the better part of half a century in decline, dismissed as the ranting of a Victorian eccentric.

  What happened between that precocious child at Hunter Street and the bearded, blue-eyed prophet who had to be passed over the heads of a packed crowd to reach his own Oxford lecture? And how did a man who believed, fervently, in hierarchy and lordship end up inspiring Gandhi, Tolstoy, the founders of the British Labour party, and the global Arts and Crafts movement?

• 2. The Education of an Eye

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  Margaret Ruskin watched every intonation of her son's voice as he read Scripture aloud, correcting false ones until he understood the verse "rightly and energetically". That method, patient and exacting, became the template for how Ruskin would spend his entire life: looking at things with absolute attention and then finding language equal to what he saw.

  His father, John James Ruskin, was a sherry and wine merchant who had saved his own family from bankruptcy by personally settling every debt his incompetent father owed, clearing the last of them in 1832. The elder Ruskin's discipline and commercial prudence formed one pole of his son's world; his love of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott formed another. When John Ruskin visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, he was disappointed by its appearance. The gap between romantic imagination and observed reality would pursue him for the rest of his life.

  The family's continental tours expanded that education in ways no schoolroom could. In 1833 they reached Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin. In 1835, Ruskin visited Venice for the first time, the city he would later call a "Paradise of cities". For his thirteenth birthday he received a copy of Samuel Rogers's poem Italy, illustrated by J. M. W. Turner; he was so struck by those images that much of his own art in the 1830s became conscious imitation of Turner's style.

  At Oxford, where Ruskin matriculated in Michaelmas 1836 at Christ Church, he was generally uninspired by the formal curriculum but made a few friendships of lasting consequence, including Henry Acland, who would eventually manoeuvre him into the Slade Professorship. His greatest Oxford success came in 1839 when, at his third attempt, he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry; Arthur Hugh Clough came second. A broken heart over Adele Domecq, the daughter of his father's business partner, and a bout of coughing blood that raised fears of consumption, derailed his final examinations. He sat for a pass degree in 1842 and was awarded an honorary double fourth.

• 3. Truth to Nature

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  A hostile review in Blackwood's Magazine in 1836, attacking several of Turner's pictures shown at the Royal Academy, had prompted the young Ruskin to write a long rebuttal. His father sent the essay to Turner, who declined to have it published. That piece finally appeared in 1903. By then a second wave of attacks on Turner had galvanised Ruskin all over again, and the result, published anonymously by Smith, Elder and Co. as "a Graduate of Oxford", was the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843.

  The argument Ruskin made was deliberately provocative. Modern landscape painters, and Turner above all, were superior to the celebrated Old Masters of the post-Renaissance period. Artists such as Gaspard Dughet, Claude and Salvator Rosa, Ruskin contended, had chosen pictorial convention over what he called "truth to nature", a standard he explained as "moral as well as material truth". The task of the artist was to observe nature directly, without studio invention, and render on canvas what he had genuinely seen and understood.

  Reviews were mixed and critics were slow to respond, but Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell were among those immediately impressed. Turner himself, both painters and Turner were by then occasional dinner guests at the Ruskin family home at Herne Hill and 163 Denmark Hill, to which the family had moved in 1842. When Turner died in 1851, Ruskin declined the honour of serving as executor but later accepted the role. He spent an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, cataloguing, framing and conserving nearly 20,000 individual artworks that Turner had left to the British nation; four hundred watercolours were then displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design.

  The second volume of Modern Painters, published in April 1846, was a more theoretical work. Ruskin argued that truth, beauty and religion are inseparably linked, that "the Beautiful" is "a gift of God", and that every great artist must both perceive beauty and communicate it through symbolic imagination. Critics gave this volume a warmer reception than the first, though many struggled with his pointed attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds.

• 4. Stones and Gothic Labour

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  In November 1849, Ruskin and his wife Effie checked into the Hotel Danieli in Venice. Their priorities could not have been more different. Effie socialised with the Austrian officers occupying the city; Ruskin worked in solitary study, driven in part by the fear that the occupying troops might destroy the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace before he could record them.

  The notes and sketches he accumulated there fed his three-volume work The Stones of Venice, published between 1851 and 1853. The book began as a technical history of Venetian architecture but grew into a broad cultural indictment of contemporary England. Venice, Ruskin argued, had decayed because its Christian faith had decayed; Renaissance artists had turned from reverence of the divine toward arrogant celebration of human sensuousness.

  The chapter titled "The Nature of Gothic", in the second volume, became one of the most politically potent passages Ruskin ever wrote. Praising Gothic ornament as the expression of the artisan's joy in free and creative work, Ruskin turned against the division of labour itself. "We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working," he wrote, "and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working." The Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College reprinted the chapter. William Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist, did so later.

  Earlier, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, the first work to bear his own name, Ruskin had organised his architectural thinking into seven moral categories he considered inseparable from building itself: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. That book contained fourteen etched plates made by Ruskin himself, and served as a challenge to the Catholic Gothic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.

• 5. The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Patron

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  John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Their commitment to painting from nature only, to depicting the world in fine, close detail, had already been shaped by Ruskin's ideas before he ever met them. The introduction came through Coventry Patmore, a mutual friend, after the artists made the first approach.

  Ruskin had not initially been impressed by Millais's painting Christ in the House of His Parents, which some contemporaries considered blasphemous. But in May 1851 he wrote letters to The Times defending the Brotherhood, and from there his support became active and personal. In the summer of 1853 he travelled to Glen Finglas in Scotland with Millais, his brother and Effie. Millais painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock and then, as had always been planned, added Ruskin's portrait to it. Millais had also painted Effie in The Order of Release, 1746, shown at the Royal Academy in 1852.

  A personal catastrophe followed. Effie had been growing ill and increasingly at odds with Ruskin and his protective parents. She fell in love with Millais. In April 1854 she filed for nullity of the marriage on grounds of non-consummation owing to Ruskin's "incurable impotency", a charge he later disputed in writing. The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not record it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year.

  Ruskin continued supporting Hunt and Rossetti, and paid Rossetti's wife Elizabeth Siddal an annuity of £150 from 1855 to 1857 to encourage her art. He also funded Henry Acland's medical care for her. Edward Burne-Jones, whom Ruskin called "Brother Ned", became a close friend. In 1857-58 and again in 1879, Ruskin exhibited his own watercolours in the United States; he also showed at the Fine Art Society in England in 1878. In March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and in May a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

• 6. The Turn to Social Justice

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  In 1858, in Turin, Ruskin stood before Paolo Veronese's Presentation of the Queen of Sheba at the Galleria Sabauda. He had just sat through a particularly dull sermon at a Waldensian church in the same city. Looking back in April 1877, he would claim that the contrast between the painting's vivid, earthly life and the dreary sermon had triggered his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. The crisis had been building for years; he wrote to Henry Acland of the geological and Biblical scholarship that seemed to undermine the literal truth of Scripture: "those dreadful hammers! I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

  The personal crisis accelerated a political shift already underway. Ruskin had long acknowledged Thomas Carlyle as the living writer to whom he owed most. Urged by Carlyle toward economic and political work, Ruskin published four essays in the new Cornhill Magazine between August and November 1860 under the title Unto This Last. The Cornhill's editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to stop the series before its end due to pressure from the magazine's conservative readership and its nervous publisher, Smith, Elder and Co. Ruskin was, in his own words, "reprobated in a violent manner" by the national press.

  The essays attacked the orthodoxy of political economy as represented by John Stuart Mill, the laissez-faire tradition descended from Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Ruskin argued that political economy's central failure was its refusal to account for the social bonds that hold communities together. All economies, he insisted, are ideally founded on social justice. Carlyle wrote to him that the essays had been "flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads" and would "do a great deal of good", declaring that Ruskin and he were now "henceforth in a minority of two".

  When his father died on the 3rd of March 1864, Ruskin inherited an estate worth between £120,000 and £157,000. He used part of it to buy property in Marylebone to support Octavia Hill's philanthropic housing work; he also opened a shop selling pure tea at 29 Paddington Street, employing two former family servants. Gandhi later called the effect of Unto This Last a "magic spell", paraphrasing it in Gujarati as Sarvodaya, meaning "The Advancement of All". The economist John A. Hobson and many founders of the British Labour party credited the essays as a direct influence.

• 7. Oxford, Brantwood, Collapse

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  Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in August 1869, largely through the efforts of Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre, to a larger audience than expected. In that lecture he told England it must found colonies "as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men". Cecil Rhodes, it was later claimed, kept a long-hand copy of the lecture.

  In 1871, Ruskin founded the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, endowing the drawing mastership with £5,000 of his own money and assembling over 800 frames of drawings, watercolours and other materials to illustrate his lectures. His lectures were frequently so popular that each had to be given twice. Among those who dug on the 1874 road-mending scheme at Ferry Hinksey Road, which Ruskin instigated to teach the virtues of manual labour, were Oscar Wilde and Alfred Milner.

  In January 1871, the same month he began lecturing wealthy Oxford undergraduates, Ruskin also began publishing his series of 96 monthly letters to "the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title Fors Clavigera, which ran until 1884. In the July 1877 letter he attacked a Nocturne by James McNeill Whistler at the Grosvenor Gallery, accusing Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler sued for libel. The trial ran on the 25th and the 26th of November 1878; Ruskin was too ill to attend. The jury awarded Whistler damages of a single farthing. Court costs were split, and Ruskin's half was paid by public subscription; Whistler was bankrupt within six months.

  In August 1871, Ruskin had purchased Brantwood, a dilapidated house on the shores of Coniston Water in the Lake District, for £1,500. It became his primary home from 1872 until his death. He added a turret to give a panoramic view of the lake, built a reservoir and redirected a waterfall. He died there from influenza on the 20th of January 1900, at the age of 80, and was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston. Joan Severn, his second cousin, who had cared for him through his prolonged mental illness, inherited his estate. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn later edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin's Works.

• 8. A Living Inheritance

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  Tolstoy described Ruskin as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, translating his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired him but helped translate his works into French, calling him "for me one of the greatest writers of all times and of all countries".

  In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto, whose cultured pearl empire made him one of the country's best-known entrepreneurs, actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation, commissioned sculptures and commemorative items, incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in his jewellery, and established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo; his children built a dedicated library to hold his Ruskin collection.

  Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius absorbed his ideas into their practice. Writers as varied as Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound acknowledged his influence. His work had been translated into German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, Esperanto, Gikuyu and several Indian languages, including Kannada.

  The Guild of St George, which Ruskin founded in 1871 and whose museum opened in the Sheffield district of Walkley in 1875, continues to operate today as a charitable education trust with international membership. The museum's collection, including art, minerals, medieval manuscripts and architectural casts, is now displayed at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery. Brantwood was purchased in 1932 by the educationist John Howard Whitehouse and opened to the public in 1934. The centenary of Ruskin's death in 2000 brought fresh public celebrations, and the bicentenary of his birth in 2019 prompted events across the world, for a writer whose lectures on "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" in 1884 described the effects of industrialisation on weather patterns in ways that later readers recognised as an early reckoning with what we now call the Anthropocene.