John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer, art critic, and reformer, a dominant influence on taste among intellectuals of the Victorian period. Ruskin is best known for his monumental studies of architecture, and its social and historical implications, described in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and its sequel, The Stones of Venice.

Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, in London and educated at the University of Oxford. His youthful passions for art, literature, and travel were encouraged by his father, a wealthy merchant. The story of his early years was told by Ruskin himself in his last work, an unfinished autobiography, Praeterita (1885-1889). His main theme, the relationship between art and morality, was first set forth, and his influence as aesthete and art critic established, with the publication in 1843 of the first volume of his Modern Painters. This work was in part a defence of the then-controversial painter J. M. W. Turner. The two books that followed, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), were studies in the religious, moral, economic, and political significance of domestic architecture. In the course of 1851 he became involved with the Pre-Raphaelites whose work he defended against what he deemed to be unfair criticism. He befriended the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Everett Millais, who later married Ruskin's wife following their divorce in 1854. Ruskin, renowned for his style, was also an effective lecturer. Rebelling against the aesthetically numbing and socially debasing effects of the Industrial Revolution, he put forth the theory that art, which is essentially spiritual, reached its zenith in the Gothic art of the late Middle Ages, which was inspired by religious and moral zeal.

Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1869, remaining in the post until 1879. He gave the university a collection of prints, drawings, and photographs, and set up a drawing school for the students. He was elected to the professorship again in 1883 but resigned the next year in protest against the practice of vivisection in the university laboratories. Ruskin, with a family history of mental disturbance, had periodic bouts of insanity beginning in about 1870, and became an invalid from 1889 until his death on January 20, 1900, in Coniston, Lancashire. His later works include Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), Lectures on the Political Economy of Art (1858), and Fors Clavigera (Club of Fate, 1871-1884), a series of letters to the workers of Britain that influenced socialist reformers for three generations.