John Ruskin

Biography

In 1878 the painter James McNeill Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. The cause was a passage in “Fors Clavigera”, in which Ruskin accused him of asking two hundred guineas for “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”, meaning “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket”. At the trial in November Ruskin was ill, and his interests were represented by Edward Burne-Jones and the Attorney General, Sir John Holker. The jury found for Whistler but awarded him a farthing, the smallest coin.

By then Ruskin was no longer young. He had begun differently.

He was born on 8 February 1819 in London, the only child of John James Ruskin, a sherry and wine importer, and Margaret Cock. His mother, a committed evangelical, made him read the Bible from beginning to end and then start again, and the language of Scripture can be heard in his prose. His father loved Byron, Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Ruskin was taught at home by his parents and private tutors; in 1834–35 he attended a school in Peckham, and then studied at King’s College, London. From childhood the family took him around England and the Continent: in 1830 a tour of the Lake District produced his first long poem, “Iteriad”; in 1833 they saw Strasbourg, Milan, Genoa and Turin; in 1835 he saw Venice for the first time. In his travel notebooks, drawings sit beside notes on rocks and landscape. In 1836 he entered Oxford, and in 1839 he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

The first volume of “Modern Painters” appeared in 1843 without the author’s name, signed “A Graduate of Oxford”. Ruskin answered the critics of Turner who had attacked his pictures shown at the Royal Academy, and argued that modern landscape painters were closer to “truth to nature” than Claude, Gaspard Dughet or Salvator Rosa. By truth he meant moral as well as material truth. The reviews were mixed, but Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell noticed the book. After Turner’s death in 1851, Ruskin catalogued the nearly twenty thousand sketches and drawings that the painter had left to the nation.

Architecture and Venice came next. “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1849) was the first book to carry his name; he etched its fourteen plates himself. The three volumes of “The Stones of Venice” (1851–53) grew from a technical history of Venetian architecture into a discussion of the moral condition of society. The chapter “The Nature of Gothic” in the second volume argued that Gothic ornament expresses the craftsman’s joy in free work, and William Morris later reissued it as a separate book. In 1845, travelling without his parents for the first time, Ruskin wrote that Venice was lost to him, and he came to the conviction that restoring a monument means destroying it, and that the right course is preservation.

I would single out his part in the story of the Pre-Raphaelites, the group of young painters who founded a brotherhood in 1848. In May 1851 he wrote letters to The Times defending the brotherhood, and he went on supporting John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the summer of 1853 he travelled to Scotland with Millais, who painted his portrait against a background of gneiss rock. Ruskin’s marriage to Effie Gray, made in 1848, was annulled in 1854, and in 1855 Effie married Millais. From 1855 to 1859 he published yearly reviews of the Royal Academy exhibitions, “Academy Notes”; people read them and feared them.

From the late 1850s his interest shifted from art to society. He taught drawing at the Working Men’s College in London, a school for adult workers, and these classes produced “The Elements of Drawing” (1857). The essays “Unto This Last” (1860) criticised the political economy of John Stuart Mill and the division of labour; their serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine was cut short by an outcry among its readers. In 1908 Mohandas Gandhi translated the work into Gujarati. After his father’s death in 1864, Ruskin inherited a large fortune and spent part of it on practical schemes: he bought houses for Octavia Hill’s housing project and opened a shop selling pure tea.

In August 1869 he was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. His lectures had to be given twice, once for students and once for the public. In 1871 he founded the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, gave it five thousand pounds, and assembled a collection of more than eight hundred framed works for teaching. That same year the monthly “Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain”, “Fors Clavigera”, began to appear (until 1884). He also founded the Guild of St George, a utopian society of landowners and workers: land for it was bought and donated at Totley near Sheffield, in the Wyre Forest and at Barmouth, and a museum for workers opened in 1875 at Walkley, in Sheffield. In 1874 he drew undergraduates, Oscar Wilde among them, into mending a road at North Hinksey. He resigned the professorship in 1879, returned to it in 1883 and left again in 1884.

In his last years he lived in the Lake District. Ruskin died on 20 January 1900 at Coniston.