The’sophisticated’ injustice of his time has not only been due to the extraordinary rift between Lee and Timothy Spalls, Turner’s brilliant achievement and Ruskin’s complete distortion, but it is at an injustice that has been going on for over a century. Although he was the prophet of his time, the patron saint of the Pre-Raphaelites and the best art historian that this country has ever created.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was one of the most prolific British art historians, supporting the careers of J.MW. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and many others. Ruskin was also an artist, photographer, botanist, environmentalist, philanthropist and social reformer who resigned to both industrialization and capitalism. He inspired countless influential people, from William Morris to Mohandas Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy.
Albert Ruskin was an amateur whose work never intended to sell, he made drawings to better understand what he was observing and also to have images to refer to while writing. Ruskin was born in 1819 in London to John James, a wealthy wine merchant and his devout Evangelical wife Margaret, who dedicated themselves to raising the genius of their only child. His work was often with plants, birds, landscapes, and he emphasized the connection between nature and art.
Raskin first gained widespread attention with the first volume of Contemporary Artists (1843), an extensive essay in defence of JMW Turner’s work in which he argued that the main role of the artist is the “truth to nature”. When Ruskin was 24 years old he wrote the first volume, “Contemporary Artists – Their Excellence in the Art of Landscape Painting over all ancient masters,” an extremely influential work which was the beginning of an attack on the artistic establishment. Three years
His beliefs were immortalized in The Stones of Venice, a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture in which he developed the ideas he had formulated in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), an extensive essay arguing that the main principles of architecture were sacrifice, truth, strength, beauty, life, memory, and obedience. There was a chapter “On the nature of Gothic” in which Ruskin suggested that architecture should reveal the spiritual and moral state of the society that created it.
Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works throughout his career and its imperfections, which embodied autonomy and talent of individual masters but also that it was a social art inspired by the love of God. These views led to his later writings criticizing laissez faire capitalism that influenced many Victorian-era painters.
Ruskins’ essays on art and architecture were enormously influential during the Victorian and Edwardian times, Ruskin gave a series of lectures in 1853 on J.MW.Turner, Gothic architecture and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Edinburgh. He has written over 250 works on topics from science to geology and ornithology, mythology, travel, political economy and social reforms after his death.
In 1898, John A. Hobson noted that in an attempt to generalize Ruskins’ thought and extract excerpts from his work, “the spell of his eloquence was broken” Despite these varied activities, Ruskins’main interests (in addition to playing Turners’ role and cataloging many of his works) have been the natural sciences, economics and sociology. The final point of his career in the visual arts occurred in 1869 when he became the first Slade Professor of Art
In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars Ruskin was born into the trading circle of prosperous and powerful Britain in the Ruskin School of Painting and Fine Arts (founded in Oxford), a collection of 1,470 drawings housed in the Ashmolean Museum.
By 1843, avant-garde artists had been working with this new spirit for several decades but criticism and public understanding fell behind. More deeply than any previous writer, Ruskin sympathetically merged 19th century English painting and 19th century English art criticism in order to warn readers that they have Turner, one of the greatest artists in the history of western art, living and working within them in modern London and the wider English school of landscape painting, a great movement of modern art.
