jrbiobrit

JOHN RUSKIN

b. Feb. 8, 1819, London, Eng.
d. Jan. 20, 1900, Coniston, Lancashire

English writer, critic, and artist who championed the Gothic Revival movement in
architecture and had a large influence upon public taste in art in Victorian
England.
Youth.
John Ruskin's parents recognized a dangerous precocity and an unstable genius in
their child and sheltered him from contact with reality. His father, John James
Ruskin, was a successful wine merchant. The Ruskins moved to Herne Hill, on the
southern outskirts of London, when Ruskin was four, and to nearby Denmark Hill,
near Dulwich, when he was 20. His natural appetite for pictures found satisfaction
in the Dulwich College Picture Gallery, and the pictures exhibited there remained
the basis of his thoughts on art.

The Dulwich gallery, his readings at home, and his father's encouragement of his
facile talents in writing and drawing were the most valuable part of his education.
He also took drawing lessons from the watercolourist Copley Fielding. When he
was 14 the family began a series of tours in Europe, and in the Alps he found the
beauty and sublimity that his imagination needed.

When he was 17 Ruskin fell in love with Adèle Domecq, the daughter of his
father's Spanish partner. The frustration of this affair seems to have been the
effective cause of a permanent failure to attain emotional maturity. In 1836
Ruskin went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where his studies were desultory and his
social life was hampered by his mother's presence in lodgings nearby. Nonetheless,
he had gotten away from the suburbs and made friends who were permanently to
enrich his life. He won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1839 and, because of a
generous allowance from his father, was able to begin to collect pictures by
J.M.W. Turner.
First visit to Italy.
Ruskin's time at the University of Oxford was interrupted suddenly in the spring of
1840, when he suffered a hemorrhage, which the doctors considered to be of
consumptive origin. They advised that he should winter abroad, and the family
departed for Italy. Ruskin made many sketches in the course of the long, leisurely
journey, but in Rome he began to have a clearer idea of the difference between
amateur and professional work. They went on to Naples, where he had another
attack, but on the return journey, by Venice through Switzerland, he regained
energy and hope. He found himself able to see natural beauty in all its
gamut--from great mountains to minute plants--with a new vividness, and he
devoted himself to describing it with artistry.
Ruskin returned to Oxford in the autumn and was graduated in the spring of 1842.
He began to plan a book in defense of Turner, whose late style of painting had
been laughed at by the critics. Returning to a new house on Denmark Hill, Ruskin
began to work seriously at the National Gallery and at Dulwich and to write the
first draft of what was to become the first volume of Modern Painters. He set out
to examine the "truth to Nature" of the accepted masters of landscape painting,
always with the glorification of Turner in mind; and in his description of landscape
in Italy and in the Alps he gave rein to his own capacity for word painting. The
book appeared in May 1843, when Ruskin was just 24, and it had a considerable
success.
Second visit to Italy.
In April 1845 Ruskin set out on a journey that was to mark a new stage in his
development. Together with a valet and an elderly mountaineer guide and without
his parents, he set forth to explore northern Italy and found in its medieval
architecture and sculpture a romantic beauty he had not known before. The
sketches he made were the best he ever achieved, and the things he saw were
forever imprinted on his memory.

When he returned to Denmark Hill it was to complete a second volume of Modern
Painters, which appeared in April 1846. A subsequent journey to Italy with his
parents, to show them the beauties he had lately discovered, was an anticlimax
and led to an attack of nervous depression. On their return he began to think of
marriage and, with hesitant encouragement from his parents, became engaged to
Euphemia Chalmers (Effie) Gray, the pretty daughter of Scottish friends of the
family, whom he married in April 1848. He was completely self-centred and gifted;
she was rather demanding and a born social climber. It is not surprising that the
marriage (never consummated) was not a success.

In August the couple visited northern France, for Ruskin had it in mind to write a
book on Gothic architecture. By April The Seven Lamps of Architecture was
finished. It took the fruits of the labours of a generation of medievalists and gave
them a generalized basis and a moral flavour; and it was extremely well written. In
the autumn of 1849 the young Ruskins went to Venice for the winter. Ruskin
wished to apply the general principles of The Seven Lamps of Architecture to
Venetian architecture and to relate its rise and fall to the working of spiritual
forces. He worked hard; the first volume of The Stones of Venice duly appeared in
1851. In the course of that year Ruskin was induced to champion the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young English artists founded in reaction
against contemporary academic painting, less because he admired them than
because he thought the critics unfair to them. He befriended the painter and poet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who disliked him; established a lasting and happy friendship
with the artist Edward Burne-Jones; and cultivated the company of John Everett
Millais, with the result that the artist and Effie fell in love. As soon as Millais had
been elected a member of the Royal Academy, with an assured future, Effie left
Ruskin. In July 1854 she secured an annulment, and a few months later she
married Millais.
Return to Denmark Hill.
Ruskin was back in the old narrow circle of Denmark Hill. The third and fourth
volumes of Modern Painters were written on an increasingly authoritarian note. His
chief interest was in the construction of the Oxford Museum of Natural History,
under the aegis of his old Oxford friend Henry Acland and according to his own
principles of Gothic beauty. He offered to undertake the sorting and arrangement
of the mass of drawings that Turner had left to the National Gallery, and, from
February 1857 for about a year, this was his chief occupation.

In 1858, again alone but for a valet and the old guide, he spent six weeks in
Turin, Italy, and recaptured the magic of the mature Renaissance in the paintings
of Paolo Veronese. The fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860), written in the
winter of 1858-59, is largely influenced by these interests. The volume is
extremely disconnected; and, indeed, Ruskin's mind was gradually declining. He fell
in love with a hysterical young Irish girl of good family, Rose La Touche, who,
when he first knew her, was a child of 10; when she was 16 he declared himself
to the parents, who were horrified. Soon after, Rose fell mentally and physically ill,
and the affair dragged sadly and hectically on until her death in 1875. During
these years, Ruskin became a habitué of Miss Bell's girls' school at Winnington,
Cheshire, where the company of the children provided a refuge; some of his later
books--notably The Ethics of the Dust (1866)--were developed from talks he
gave to the pupils. His only important work at this time was a set of essays on
the nature of wealth that he wrote in 1860. His views (based to some extent on
those of the reformer and socialist Robert Owen) included the theory of social
justice and were utterly contrary to the laissez-faire doctrines of the time, which
derived from the teachings of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The
Cornhill Magazine began to publish the essays, but they roused so much
opposition among its readers that the magazine's editor, William Makepeace
Thackeray, discontinued them. Ruskin published them as a book under the title
Unto This Last (1862).
He was near a breakdown and retired for a time to Mornex, near Geneva. He
returned in time for his father's last illness and death in March 1864 and continued
to live with his aging mother at Denmark Hill. His father bequeathed Ruskin
£120,000, various properties, and a fine collection of pictures; but he had neither
peace of mind nor strength of purpose left.
Last years.
In 1869 Ruskin was elected the first Slade professor of fine art at Oxford, and he
had a great personal success as a lecturer. He gave the university a collection of
prints, photographs, and drawings for undergraduates to study, and he set up a
drawing school for them. He had a need to address himself to those of another
intellectual class than himself and, thus, wrote two series of letters to
workingmen, Time and Tide (1867) and a much longer set, Fors Clavigera
(1871-84). The last was the organ of the Company of St. George, which he
founded in 1871 and endowed with a capital of £10,000. It was intended to carry
out his economic doctrines; every "companion" was to give it a 10th of his
income, and for many years Ruskin did. Its activities were often ill-judged and
were usually unfortunate; a museum of art at Sheffield was the most successful.
Bouts of illness interrupted work at Oxford; after his mother's death, in 1871,
Ruskin sold the house at Denmark Hill and bought Brantwood, an ugly residence
beautifully situated on Coniston Water in the Lake District, where he spent much
of his time, with a married cousin to keep house for him. He began to be obsessed
with the idea of the "Storm-Cloud and Plague-Wind" that were everywhere defiling
natural beauty, and finally in 1878 he suffered some months of acute mania. Early
in 1879 he resigned his professorship, giving as his excuse that the painter James
McNeill Whistler had won a libel action against him for his intemperate criticism of
one of the latter's "Nocturnes."

Ruskin's intellectual life was over. He showed improvement in 1880-81 and even
resumed work at Oxford, but the years that followed were checkered by attacks
of mania. It was in these years, however, that he wrote the most charming of his
works, the autobiography called Praeterita (1885-89). It offered escape from the
present, and, since he had kept a diary for much of his life, he had materials to
work on. It was never finished; after a sixth attack of madness, in the summer of
1889, he was incapable for the last months of his life of writing anything but his
signature.
Assessment
It is usual to think of Ruskin as a typical public figure of Victorian England, the
keeper of the artistic conscience of his country who upheld the preeminence of
the Gothic style and demanded its employment in building and decoration.
Nevertheless, the public's acceptance of Ruskin as a prophet in art was not
immediate. Though the substantive part of his pure art criticism was written
before he was 35, he was considered to be something of an amateur, a rich
dilettante, until after he was 50. By this time, the Gothic Revival movement, with
roots in the late 18th century, had already become established as a leading
current style, independently of his championship of it. By the last quarter of the
19th century, Ruskin's opinions on art were regarded as almost infallible; but from
the 1860s he himself had lost interest in art criticism for its own sake, and his
creative ideas were active in political and social economy. His puritanical
conscience never let him rest easy in the enjoyment of his unearned wealth. He
tried at first to justify his enjoyment of beauty by theorizing about it, and later,
when this no longer satisfied him, he turned to economic and social questions.

Ruskin lived an inwardly difficult, lonely life, often pursued and struck at by
madness. His interests were wide, embracing art, natural science, political
science, and economic and social studies. Yet the variety of interest was also
symptomatic of a want of concentration that increased with time and caused him,
from one hour to the next, to abandon one kind of study for another. His art
criticism, too, for all its influence and its breadth, is unsystematic and established
on his personal responses. Here his apparent limitations are partly those of his
time, when art criticism and art history--to which his own writings gave a major
impetus--were still only lightly cultivated fields. He had little knowledge or
appreciation of any art outside that of Renaissance Italy and of England, and he
had no sympathy with the Impressionist movement of his own day.

Yet Ruskin was a man of true originality. He was a completely honest and
curiously innocent man. As a rich man's son, he was free to work at what he liked
and generally wrote easily of what interested him. This amateur quality gives a
characteristic sparkle and zest to his treatment of all his many themes. His
originality and his intellectual self-indulgence were inextricably mixed with his
psychological weakness. But, in spite of these disabilities (and sometimes because
of them), he was able to perceive beauty with an infectious intensity and to
express his perception in memorable prose, sometimes made even more cogent by
accompanying drawings and sketches, for he was a good amateur draftsman.

What, then, are Ruskin's essential ideas on art and society, and how can they be
summarized? It must be remembered first that Ruskin was a follower of the poet
William Wordsworth in his love of nature. Ruskin founded his aesthetic principles
upon truth to nature in landscape painting and tried to prove his point by
contrasting, in Modern Painters, the sensitive accuracy in this respect of J.M.W.
Turner, the great landscape painter of the first part of the 19th century in
England, with the conventional generalizations of Claude Lorrain, the great
landscapist of 17th-century France. He went on to find the same truthfulness,
but now united with religious feeling, in Gothic architecture. He looked with care
at the natural forms of its decoration, carved with delicate reserve by a host of
anonymous craftsmen. The gesticulation of the Baroque and its ornaments, such
as urns, scrolls, and obelisks--forms not found in nature--seemed artificial and
false to him and so, in his view, constituted bad art. His conception of good art as
a storehouse of natural truth, which also was its source, led to his ideal view of
the workman as a dedicated individual who needed to find fulfillment through doing
work with a valid purpose. Social justice required the provision of conditions that
would allow all to share with the creative artist the opportunity for work of this
kind, but such conditions were not generally to be found. Thus, he was led from
criticism and exposition of art to a concern with social welfare. Yet one comes
back to the fact that he is remembered best in the world of art.

jenlit@alumni.uv.es
14171 Hipertextos y Literatura Inglesa
John Ruskin