John Ruskin biography

Dromo's Den

John Ruskin Biography

RUSKIN, John (1819–1900). An English author, art critic, and reformer, born in London, Feb. 8, 1819. His boyhood and youth he depicted with great charm in Præterita. His father, John James Ruskin, a shrewd and artistic Scotchman, was then settled in London, where he prospered as a wine merchant, eventually amassing a fortune of £200,000. The boy was educated at home by his mother, a strict Evangelical Puritan. Private tutors taught him Latin, Greek, and French. He studied drawing under Runciman, Copley Fielding, and later with Harding. In verse his masters were Rogers, Byron, and Shelley. He accompanied his father and mother on many tours through England, visiting the lakes, read and wrote verse, sketched, and in 1835 saw the Alps and Italy. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1836. His university course was interrupted by illness. Threatened with consumption, he traveled with his parents in England and on the Continent. At Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1842, he won the Newdigate prize with a poem entitled Salsette and Elephanta (1839). In 1843 appeared the first volume of Modern Painters, the primary design of which was to prove the superiority of modern landscape painters, especially Turner, to the old masters; but in the later volumes (ii, 1846; iii and iv, 1856; v, 1860) the work expanded into a vast discursive treatise on the principles of art. Modern Painters was revolutionary in its spirit and aim and naturally excited the aversion and hostility of conservatives.

The first artists to accept Ruskin were a group of young men known as the Pre-Raphaelites (q.v.). Convincing and memorable is his defense of them against popular ridicule in his essay entitled Pre-Raphaelitism (1851). While Modern Painters was in progress Ruskin published other books on art, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), The Stones of Venice (vol. i, 1851; vols. ii and iii, 1853), both of which aimed to introduce a new and loftier conception of the significance of architecture. Like the later volumes of Modern Painters they were illustrated by Ruskin himself, an accomplished draftsman. Still other works on art flowed from his pen—Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1853), Elements of Drawing (1857), Political Economy of Art (1857), and annual notes on the Royal Academy. Meanwhile he had also published Poems (1850) and the beautiful fairy tale The King of the Golden River (1851).

However varied Ruskin's writings had been hitherto, they bore a close relation to art. But in Unto this Last (Cornhill Magazine, 1860) the artistic purpose, though present, is less apparent. Here Ruskin began his attack on the "dismal science" called political economy, to be continued in Munera Pulveris (1862-63), Time and Tide (1867), and Fors Clavigera (1871-84), a series of letters to the workmen of England, far above their heads. To this later period belong also Sesame and Lilies (1865), charming essays on literature and other subjects; Ethics of the Dust (1866); The Crown of Wild Olive (1866; complete, 1873), lectures on work, traffic, and the future of England, with an eloquent introduction; The Queen of the Air (1869), a study of Greek myths of cloud and storm; Aratra Pentelici (1872), on sculpture; Love's Meinie (1873), on birds; Ariadne Florentina (1873-76), on wood and metal engraving; Val d'Arno (1874), on Florentine art of the thirteenth century; Mornings in Florence (1875-77), further studies in Italian art; Proserpina (1875-86), studies of wayside flowers; Deucalion (1875-83), on rocks; St. Mark's Rest (1877-84), a manual on Venetian art; The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), intended as the first volume of a history of Christendom for boys and girls; The Art of England (1884); Præterita (1885-89), a review of his life; a volume of collected poems in 1891; and a large body of other essays. A famous reprint of his miscellanies is On the Old Road (1885). For many years Ruskin lectured before large audiences in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and other places. From 1870 to 1879 he was Slade professor of art at Oxford; in 1883 he was reëlected to the chair, but resigned the next year, owing to ill health. With his fortune Ruskin embarked upon many charitable undertakings and through them his wealth dwindled away until his only income was from the sale of his books. This, however, amounted, from 1890 to 1900, to about £4000 a year. He long made his home at Denmark Hill, in London. In 1871 he bought Brantwood, a small estate by Coniston Lake, where he passed his last years, and died Jan. 20, 1900.

As an art critic Ruskin was not generally accepted by artists. In this field his service was rather to awaken in his generation a sense for the beautiful. Of strong ethical temperament, he always insisted that beauty should not be divorced from righteousness. His political economy, tending to Socialism, has been attacked by the learned. With all its vagaries it was a noble plea for the higher things of the mind against utilitarianism. Against railways and factories marring the beauty of English landscape he took a firm stand, and for his age he discovered the beauties of river, cloud, and mountain. In the development of English prose he is likely to have a place as the one who moved prose towards verse without passing the boundary line. Of this new prose no better example could be cited than the introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive, with its assonances and grand rhythms.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 232-233.