John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the most prominent art and architecture critic of his day. His books, pamphlets, and letters to the press had an influence on all classes of society, from road-menders to royalty. He still has a popular reputation in the twenty-first century, though he is remembered today less for his views than for his failed marriage. His wife Effie Gray left him for the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, whose work until then Ruskin had been promoting. Ruskin is more often the image of a Victorian prude, but of course there was more to him than that.

In this book Andrew Ballantyne shows us how Ruskin’s ideas gave a clear moral character to art, architecture, and the picturesque and reveals why and how his reputation endures. Ruskin’s story is the story of a family: the important people in Ruskin’s life were his devoted parents, who were convinced that their son was a genius. Ruskin’s greatest and most personal enthusiasm was for geology, but it was a passion that remained under-developed as he obliged his father by writing about art and architecture, and his mother by showing that these things had a moral and spiritual value. They were a great team, and while they were alive Ruskin wrote his best works:Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice andUnto This Last. After they died he seemed lost until he put himself in the hands of a younger cousin, Joan Severn, who guarded her idea of his reputation as his mental capacities declined, out of the public gaze, in the Lake District.

Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s life and work into a narrative about Victorian society: Ruskin lived at a time when the first great industrial cities took shape, and he was horrified by the conditions of life of the poorer urban workers. His solution was to open the eyes of the working classes to beauty and wonder, by teaching them to draw. Ruskin’s evangelical passion came from his conviction that art and architecture were much more than polite accomplishments: that they held the key to living a worthwhile life.