Ruskin was the greatest British art critic
and social commentator of the Victorian Age.
His ideas inspired the Arts and
Crafts Movement and the founding of the National Trust, the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the
Labour Movement. He fiercely attacked the worst aspects of industrialization,
and actively promoted art education and
museums for the working classes. His prophetic statements on environmental
issues speak to our generation as well as to his
own.
Born on 8 February 1819, the son of a
prosperous sherry importer, Ruskin became a published poet and writer on
geology by
the age of fifteen, by which time he knew the Bible intimately. Throughout
his life he undertook extended tours of Britain and the
Continent, providing material for literary works such as The Poetry
of Architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The
Stones of Venice, Mornings in Florence, and The Bible of Amiens.
Ruskin's admiration for the work of J.M.W. Turner led to the writing
of Modern Painters (5 vols), his magnum opus After the
publication of the third and fourth volumes in 1856, George Eliot wrote:
'I venerate him as one of the great Teachers of the day
. . . . The two last volumes of Modern Painters contain, I think, some
of the finest writing of this age.' By this time Ruskin's
readership in America was even larger than that in Britain, and later
his work shaped the thinking of Gandhi, Tolstoy and
Proust. Today there are important holdings of Ruskin material in the
USA and in Tokyo, home of the Mikimoto Collection.
Ruskin was a great teacher, campaigner and controversialist. In the
early 1850s he championed the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood and taught in the Working Men's College,
London. Later in his career he used his tenure of the Slade
Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford to challenge established ideas
on art and education. In the 1870s, while publishing his
Oxford lectures, Ruskin also wrote Fors Clavigera, his monthly 'Letters
to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain'.
Fors, and his lectures and books on socio-economic issues and on scientific
topics, including Unto This Last and Munera
Pulveris, The Crown of Wild Olive and Sesame and Lilies, The Queen
of the Air and The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth
Century, reflect the breadth of his intellect, while his autobiographical
writings, particularly Praeterita, reveal a sensitive and
tormented mind.
Ruskin created the Guild of St George, of which he was the first Master,
and which still quietly continues his work today. He
generously endowed the Guild's St George's Museum in Sheffield, and
the Ruskin Drawing School in Oxford. He taught many
people how to draw, published The Elements of Drawing and The Elements
of Perspective, and was himself a superb
draughtsman.
By the time Ruskin died at Brantwood on
20 January 1900 he had accumulated a large collection of material which
reflects his extraordinary range of interests and achievements: the
manuscript diaries and notebooks in which he
recorded events, ideas and cloud formations, sketched the Stones of
Venice and the geological strata of the Alps,
drafted sermons, poems and lectures; his remarkable drawings through
which he learned to observe the world in great detail,
and which he used to teach others; literary manuscripts and editions
of his own works; the photographs and daguerreotypes
which added to his unique record of the external world.
URL: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/ruskin/jrbiog.htm
©Lancaster University approved page maintained by
Ruth Hutchison
All material in these pages (c) 2000 The Ruskin Programme,
Lancaster University
Lancaster University approved page maintained by
Ruth Hutchison
Pages last updated: 18 April 2000
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