| |
More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
|
John Ruskin
|
|
|
(1819–1900)
The most influential art critic of the 19C. He engaged in three main crusades. The first was a passionate advocacy of *Turner, whose impressionistic late style had met with criticism; in the first volume of Modern Painters (5 vols, 1843–60) Ruskin argued that he was a great artist because of his underlying truth to nature.
|
|
|
|
|
The second was his crusade for Gothic architecture, as against classical or baroque, on the grounds that it was more spiritual and more structurally honest – the theme of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (3 vols, 1851–3). And the third was his defence of the *Pre-Raphaelites, partly in response to intemperate attacks on them but also because he saw their minutely observed detail as a form of truth to nature, and one which he himself practised in his watercolours of mountains and rocks.
|
|
|
|
|
It was his friendship with the Pre-Raphaelites which brought to an end his disastrous and unconsummated marriage of 1848 to Effie Gray; in 1854 she had it annulled so that she could marry *Millais. In his later years Ruskin concentrated increasingly on the political side of his campaign against the crass modern world, spending much time and money trying to achieve for the working classes better living conditions, education in a craft and contact with objects of beauty (the collection which he gathered together for this purpose is displayed in the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield). From 1872 he lived in Brantwood, a house beside *Coniston Water which is kept now as a museum.
|
|
|
|