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=                            John_Ruskin                             =
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                            Introduction
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John Ruskin (8 February 1819  20 January 1900) was an English polymath
a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and
philanthropist of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as
art, architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology,
botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth.

Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He
wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and
manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches
and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural
structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised
his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language
designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his
writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and
society.

Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century
and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his
reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication
of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and
concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in
environmentalism, sustainability, ethical consumerism, and craft.

Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of
'Modern Painters' (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of
J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal duty of the
artist is "truth to nature". This meant rooting art in experience and
close observation. From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites,
who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on
social and political issues. 'Unto This Last' (1860, 1862) marked the
shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of
Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin
School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the
workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title
'Fors Clavigera' (1871-1884). In the course of this complex and deeply
personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal
society. Its practical outcome was the founding of the Guild of St
George, an organisation that endures today.


Genealogy
===========
Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James
Ruskin (1785-1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner
and 'de facto' business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see
Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh,
Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from
Hertfordshire. His wife, Ruskin's mother, Margaret Cock (1781-1871),
was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin
household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.


John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in
London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but
apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent
businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose
prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all
debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were
engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the
problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally
married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864
and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley,
Croydon.


Childhood and education
=========================
Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick
Square, London (demolished 1969), south of what is now St Pancras
railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting
influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely
ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's
Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare
and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in
1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin,
an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her
husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end,
and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory.
Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect
on his writing. He later wrote:



Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ),
near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of
his own age, but it was not the friendless and joyless experience he
later said it was in his autobiography, 'Praeterita' (1885-89). He was
educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including
Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza
Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing
Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the
progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797-1870). Ruskin heard Dale
lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first
Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enrol and complete
his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under
Dale's tutelage.


Travel
========
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels
he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and
augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits
to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to
English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them
to the Lake District (his first long poem, 'Iteriad', was an account
of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as
1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours
became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited
Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which
Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps,
and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of
cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later
work.

These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his
impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional
poetry, some of which was published in 'Friendship's Offering'. His
early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and
technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings,
remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel
Rogers's poem 'Italy' (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a
13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the
accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own
art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout,
whose 'Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany' (1833) he also admired.
His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles
Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.


First publications
====================
Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first
publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally
entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and
published in the 'Spiritual Times') (August 1829). In 1834, three
short articles for Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural History' were
published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific"
observer of nature, especially its geology.

From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's 'The Poetry of
Architecture' was serialised in Loudon's 'Architectural Magazine',
under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It
was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a
Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their
immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key
themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the
Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in
'Transactions of the Meteorological Society'.


Oxford
========
In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford,
taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year.
Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his
aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and
suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time
there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev
Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior
tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private
tutor, the Reverend Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist
and natural theologian William Buckland. Among his fellow
undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas
Newton and Henry Acland.

His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt,
he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough
came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary
degree, at the ceremony.

Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his
family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High
Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to
hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his
father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In
April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough
blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford
travelling with his parents.

Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had
been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the
twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a
six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798-1878)
celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the
fable 'The King of the Golden River' (not published until December
1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A
work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the
Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most
translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a
pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class
degree in recognition of his achievements.


''Modern Painters I'' (1843)
==============================
For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was
abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art
were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were
introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur
Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into
writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several
of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an
attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in 'Blackwood's Magazine' in
1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had
sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It
finally appeared in 1903.

Before Ruskin began 'Modern Painters', John James Ruskin had begun
collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner.
Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne
Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved
in 1842.

What became the first volume of 'Modern Painters' (1843), published by
Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of
Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin
controversially argued that modern landscape painters--and in
particular Turner--were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the
post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old
Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator
Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He
explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of
the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in
a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and
understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern
landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of
water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of
which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had
seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with
extraordinary verbal felicity.

Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many
notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young
man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly
Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre
of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics,
scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship
with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly
20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.


1845 tour and ''Modern Painters II'' (1846)
=============================================
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844,
visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the
paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre.
In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents
for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study
medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially
Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della
Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture
(he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La
Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in
Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the
works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and
Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the
combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is
lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural
restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful
action was preservation and conservation.

Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of 'Modern
Painters' (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on
Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was
a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked
the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion
are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In
defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all
great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination,
communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation.
Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception,
although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated
with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was
abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a
poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the
tension between them.


Marriage to Effie Gray
========================
During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the
daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written
'The King of the Golden River'. The couple were engaged in October.
They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once
the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of
John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association
and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European
Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels
together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where
Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.

Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair,
secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6
Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake
the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his
parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of
'Modern Painters'. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine
beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly
sensitive social conscience.

The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie
and distrustful of her. For unclear reasons the marriage was never
consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.


Architecture
==============
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the
Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, 'The Seven Lamps of
Architecture' (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The
title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to
and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power,
beauty, life, memory, and obedience. All would provide recurring
themes in his future work. 'Seven Lamps' promoted the virtues of a
secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the
Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.


''The Stones of Venice''
==========================
In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the
Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their
contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to
socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In
particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's
Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be
destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops,
Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently
with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that
Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her,
as an excuse to separate.

Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he
used for his three-volume work 'The Stones of Venice' (1851-53).
Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the
Byzantine to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, 'Stones'
represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a
warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued
that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been
compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true
Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists
honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.

The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of
'Stones'. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an
expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker
must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas,
ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.



This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the
division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in
general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by
the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and
later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.


Pre-Raphaelites
=================
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The
Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' - "paint[ing] from nature
only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.

Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an
approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore.
Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's 'Christ in the
House of His Parents' (1849-50), a painting that some considered
blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to 'The Times' during May 1851. Providing
Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of
1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin
and Effie where, at Glen Finglas, he painted the closely observed
landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been
intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.

Millais had painted a picture of Effie for 'The Order of Release,
1746', exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly
from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing
fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective
parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The
Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in
love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.

During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of
"non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin
later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The
annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his
diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons
for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage
are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.

Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an
annuity of £150 in 1855-1857 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to
encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her
medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also
received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including
John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became
a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval
of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.

During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual
exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title 'Academy Notes'
(1855-1859, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or
breaking reputations. The satirical magazine 'Punch' published the
lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And
sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then
nobody will buy."

Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner
drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very
distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the
United States in 1857-58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the
Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in
Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created
many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed
botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his
work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room
of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline
Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the 'Little Church of St
Francis' Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed
by him. Originally placed in the 'St. Peter's Church' Duntisbourne
Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the
Nativity.

Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic
style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive
"Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin
supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University
Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward) -- which is
the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to
satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's
development, not least its increasing cost, and the University
authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved
increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.


Ruskin and education
======================
The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at
Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first
formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught
drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working
Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick
James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not
share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that
through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of
(self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's
'Elements of Drawing' (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by
means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and
a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful
recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later
come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.

From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school
for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor,
letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the
school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music
and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association
led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, 'The Ethics of the Dust' (1866), an
imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself
as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography,
it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In
the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational
institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers,
where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was
also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for
Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville
College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited
regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational
institutions for women.


''Modern Painters III'' and ''IV''
====================================
Both volumes III and IV of 'Modern Painters' were published in 1856.
In 'MP' III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the
spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are
capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them
into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. 'MP' IV
presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and
their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The
contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain
Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis,
highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.


Public lecturer
=================
In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s
Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first
public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on
architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures
Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as 'The Political
Economy of Art' and later under Keats's phrase, 'A Joy For Ever'. In
these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use
it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and
that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a
responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The
increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's
interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of
economists, as represented by a hostile review in the 'Manchester
Examiner and Times'. As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted,
Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters
written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.

Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in
1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin
University has grown. In 'The Two Paths' (1859), five lectures given
in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued
that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the
labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and
Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427-87.) The year 1859 also marked his last
tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited
Germany and Switzerland.


Turner Bequest
================
Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851.
Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin
respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration
of the sea, 'The Harbours of England', revolving around Turner's
drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's 'Notes on
the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856' was published. He
persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner
Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the
artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed
in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four
hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own
design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as
previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic
drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards
Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)


Religious "unconversion"
==========================
In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from
Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's 'Presentation of
the Queen of Sheba' at the Galleria Sabauda. He would later claim (in
April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly
with a particularly dull sermon that he had listened to at a
Waldensian church in Turin, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical
Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith
for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that was
seen as undermining the literal truth and absolute authority of the
Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the
chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This
"loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His
confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date
had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned
to Christianity.


Social critic and reformer: ''Unto This Last''
================================================
Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and
wrote 'Unto This Last'… the central work of my life" the break was not
so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and urged to
political and economic work by his professed "master" Thomas Carlyle,
to whom he acknowledged that he "owed more than to any other living
writer", Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art
towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and
write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many
other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art
practice and judgement ('The Cestus of Aglaia'), botany and mythology
('Proserpina' and 'The Queen of the Air'). He continued to draw and
paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with
servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in
the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel
Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet
increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking
industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political
economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent
style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his
message straightforwardly.





Ruskin authored several works on political economy. Ruskin's social
view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider
issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he
had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now
dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill,
based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work
of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays
'Unto This Last', Ruskin rejected the division of labour as
dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work),
and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to
consider the social affections that bind communities together. He
articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on
Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes
sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and
societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His
ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by
networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental
organisations.

The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly
instalments of the new 'Cornhill Magazine' between August and November
1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the
'Cornhills editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon
the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative
readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder &
Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was,
he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also
strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Carlyle, who
wrote, "I have read your Paper with exhilaration… Such a thing flung
suddenly into half a million dull British heads… will do a great deal
of good", declaring that they were "henceforth in a minority of
'two'", a notion which Ruskin seconded.

Ruskin's political ideas, and 'Unto This Last' in particular, later
proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in
Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their
positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders
of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.

Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was,
and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He
believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the
conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social
differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning
capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on
obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural
economy.



Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final
volume of 'Modern Painters' focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and
Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks
are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity.
Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting 'Modern Painters' V and
'Unto This Last' is Ruskin's "Law of Help":



Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic
terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when 'Fraser's
Magazine', under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his
'Essays on Political Economy' (1862-63) (later collected as 'Munera
Pulveris' (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in 'Time
and Tide' (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in
Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in
literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted
honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the
need for co-operation.

Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's
death in 1864, he inherited an estate worth between £120,000 and
£157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune,
inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an
entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal
philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his
first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill
(originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone
to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours
extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any
quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving
employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and
crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean
and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a
symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest
practical experiments would come in his later years.

In 1865-66, Ruskin became involved in the controversy surrounding
Edward John Eyre's suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion. Mill
formed the Jamaica Committee for the purpose of holding Governor Eyre
accountable for what they perceived to be his unlawful, inhumane, and
unnecessary quelling of the insurrection. In response, the Eyre
Defence and Aid Fund was formed to support Eyre for having fulfilled
his duty to defend order and save the white population from danger;
Carlyle served as the chairman. Ruskin allied with the Defence,
writing a letter which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' in December
1865 ("they are for Liberty, and I am for Lordship; they are Mob's
men, and I am a King's man"), donating £100 to the Fund, and giving a
speech at Waterloo Place on Pall Mall in September 1866, also reported
in the 'Telegraph'. In addition to this, Ruskin "threw himself into"
personal work for the Defence, "enlisting recruits, persuading
waverers, combating objections."


Lectures in the 1860s
=======================
Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the
University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British
Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell
on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.' Ruskin's
widely admired lecture, 'Traffic', on the relation between taste and
morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which
he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new
Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told
his audience, "because 'you' don't!" These last three lectures were
published in 'The Crown of Wild Olive' (1866).

The lectures that comprised 'Sesame and Lilies' (published 1865),
delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and
Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal
conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund)
explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs.
books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens'
Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women,
asserting their rights and duties in education, according them
responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the
human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men.
This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly
awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however,
has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at
"Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new
heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere.
Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate
spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for
parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's
political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.


Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art
============================================
Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art
at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the
offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural
lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a
larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of
any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues… she
[England] must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able,
formed of her most energetic and worthiest men;--seizing every piece
of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on…" It has been claimed
that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing
that it supported his own view of the British Empire.

In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin
School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within
the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin
endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also
established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other
materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures.
The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the
government art schools (the "South Kensington System").

Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given
twice--once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them
were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured
on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art"
encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood
and metal engraving ('Ariadne Florentina'), the relation of science to
art ('The Eagle's Nest') and sculpture ('Aratra Pentelici'). His
lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and
literature. "The teaching of Art…", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of
all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer.
When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen
as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the
Ashmolean Museum.

Most controversial, from the point of view of the University
authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme
on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by
Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved
undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in
part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some
of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's
future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly
influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard A.
Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a
public service ethic that was later given expression in the university
settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall,
Oxford.

In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, a decision forced on him partly
because of his declining health and finally precipitated by the
Whistler trial. He resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign
again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he
had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who
refused to expand his Drawing School.


''Fors Clavigera'' and the Whistler libel case
================================================
In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the
wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96
(monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain"
under the title 'Fors Clavigera' (1871-84). (The letters were
published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These
letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and
were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and
circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his
publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher
(see Allen & Unwin).


In the July 1877 letter of 'Fors Clavigera', Ruskin launched a
scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at
the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with 'Nocturne in
Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket', and accused Whistler of asking
two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's
face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill
when the case went to trial in November 1878, so the artist Edward
Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The
trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the
art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore
appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith
appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not
in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also
agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend
as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones,
representing Ruskin, also asserted that 'Nocturne in Black and Gold'
was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones
said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but
also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill
in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury
awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the
realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties.
Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art
Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced
to sell his house on Tite Street in London and move to Venice. The
episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation and may have accelerated his
mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense
of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt
priorities.


Guild of St George
====================
Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871
(although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St
George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and
objectives were articulated in 'Fors Clavigera'. A communitarian
protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a
hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated
members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary
life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed
by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the
minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich
the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful
objects. Toward this end, with a tithe (or personal donation) of
£7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.

Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the
agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with
only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from
wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property
in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire,
called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales;
Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and
Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.

In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of
"Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and
even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's
Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching
(his 'Bibliotheca Pastorum' or 'Shepherd's Library'), but the schools
themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely
related to the 'Bibliotheca', he supported Francesca Alexander's
publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the
Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has
only ever operated on a small scale.

Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St.
George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth
goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in
spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District
and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home
Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.

The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation
of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval
manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and
beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the
Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by
Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in 'Modern Painters' III
(1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world
is to 'see' something, and to tell what it 'saw' in a plain way."
Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working
man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those
who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been
digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to
Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's
Millennium Gallery.


Rose La Touche
================
Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by
Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet
and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting
in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when
Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused
difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at
various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the
Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into
personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at
the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to
increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving breakdowns and
delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock,
Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels,
whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his
appreciation and understanding of nature.

Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended séances at Broadlands.
Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a
life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to
revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.


Travel guides
===============
Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art
of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's 'St
Ursula' in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche,
would haunt him, described in the pages of 'Fors'. In 1874, on his
tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.

Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and
gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he
said, "what guidance I may to travellers…" 'The Stones of Venice' was
revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879.
Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his
cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and
Italy: 'Mornings in Florence' (1875-1877), 'The Bible of Amiens'
(1880-1885) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), 'St
Mark's Rest' (1877-1884) and 'A Guide to the Principal Pictures in…
Venice' (1877).


Final writings
================
In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had
been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron
and Wordsworth in 'Fiction, Fair and Foul' (1880) in which, as Seth
Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape
caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of
the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his
lectures, 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century' (1884),
describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather
patterns. Ruskin's 'Storm-Cloud' has been seen as foreshadowing
environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his
more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with
which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.

His last great work was his autobiography, 'Praeterita' (1885-1889)
(meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective,
eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of
which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.

The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable
decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to
Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour,
(which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888) from which
he never fully recovered. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic
movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world,
his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine
of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to
dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant,
especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators
such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of
Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and
respected Darwin personally.


Brantwood and final years
===========================
In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat
dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the
English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's
main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for
more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house
built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the
construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the
'Jumping Jenny'), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a
turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he
later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a
reservoir and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate
seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the
lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the
hillside.

Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various
Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated
congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at
Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was
buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his
wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental
illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na)
Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her
family inherited his estate. 'Joanna's Care' was the eloquent final
chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting
tribute.

Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and
his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to
his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental
39-volume 'Library Edition' of Ruskin's 'Works', the last volume of
which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex
interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to
guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.

The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his
reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years
that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a
series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by
the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist,
John Howard Whitehouse.

Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open
to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an
educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin
Society organises events throughout the year. A series of public
celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the
centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to
mark the bicentenary of his birth.


Note on Ruskin's personal appearance
======================================
In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as
slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant,
piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high
collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark
blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard,
and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.


Ruskin in the eyes of a student
=================================
The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an
eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):



An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had
aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford,
served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:


International
===============
Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as
"one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our
generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively
from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired
Ruskin but helped translate his works into French, describing him as
"for me one of the greatest writers of all times and of all
countries".  Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by 'Unto
This Last' and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it
'Sarvodaya', "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto
actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned
sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian
rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He
established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a
dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.

A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his
political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin,
Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth
Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from
1894 to 1899. One of Ruskin's students, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead,
founded the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, partly inspired
by his teacher's beliefs.

Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including,
in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese):
German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish,
Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, Esperanto,
Gikuyu, and several Indian languages such as Kannada.


Art, architecture and literature
==================================
Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines
acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier,
Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his
ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K.
Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound
felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an
enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them
Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work
well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist
and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker
and utopianist Eric Gill. Explorer Edward Wilson used his works as an
influence as while painting scientific and artistic sketches and
watercolours of the Terra Nova Expedition. Aside from E. T. Cook,
Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists
influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent
H. W. Nevinson.


Craft and conservation
========================
William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen
disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the Arts
and Crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces
and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his
friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National
Trust.


Society, education and sport
==============================
Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick
Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in
justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders
of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.

Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly
inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex,
which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas
and Tolstoy's.

The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse,
who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent
Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse
established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along
Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest
Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an
educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working
men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and
Charles A. Beard.

Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time
Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was
eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the
establishment of the Net Book Agreement.

Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he
gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine
Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The
Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection
for in-person and online drawing courses.

Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited
Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should
be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere
championship competitions.


Politics and critique of political economy
============================================
Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas
informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A.
Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in
university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies
formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in
Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such
as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William
Beveridge (author of the Report … on Social Insurance and Allied
Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged
their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare
state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged
Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. In Nazi
Germany, Ruskin was seen as an early British National Socialist.
William Montgomery McGovern's 'From Luther to Hitler' (1941)
identified Ruskin as a thinker who made Nazism possible, and one 1930s
German headmaster told his students that "Carlyle and Ruskin were the
first National Socialists." More recently, Ruskin's works have also
influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.


Ruskin in the 21st century
============================
In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking
the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.

Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at
Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum,
both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular
exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in
Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and
hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open
to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today,
in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.

Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name:
The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin
College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and
Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at
the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin
Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting
the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and
the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition,
there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at
the University of Pittsburgh.

Ruskin, Florida, United States--site of one of the short-lived
American Ruskin Colleges--is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural
by Michael Parker (artist) of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on
a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.

Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's
legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver
Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin
and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with
Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The
sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's
notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as
YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars
Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a
combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth
changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and
so-called parametric design.

Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and
Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd,
Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of
Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were
among those to contribute to the symposium, 'There is no wealth but
life: Ruskin in the 21st Century'. Jonathan Glancey at 'The Guardian'
and Andrew Hill at the 'Financial Times' have both written about
Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by
Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded 'Meristem'
in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with
developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals,
transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving
post-industrial society.


                        Theory and criticism
======================================================================
Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but
expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology,
literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology,
travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's
works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in
1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The
range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and
associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898,
John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's
thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell
of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that,
"The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their
intended contexts [… is] something which Ruskin himself detested and
which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless,
some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further
consideration.


Art and design criticism
==========================
Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He
believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and
appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions
should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist,
through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists
in 'Modern Painters' I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart…
rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the
1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he
said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a
basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art
should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be
revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the
artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler
because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of
art.

Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in 'The Stones of
Venice' typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in
his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival,
paralysed in its old age… an architecture invented, as it seems, to
make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and
sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is
idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and
all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and
standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his
emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised
the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural
forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and
decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived
between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural
environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century
to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had
helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of
what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.

For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral
truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the
'meaning' of architecture--as a combination of the values of strength,
solidity and aspiration--all written, as it were, in stone. For
Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole
community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the
sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved
grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were
proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom
of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters,
no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast,
expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin
associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular
with the demoralising consequences of the Industrial Revolution,
resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he
criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works
over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature
of Gothic" from the second volume of 'The Stones of Venice' (1853) is
widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative
discussions of his central argument.

Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles,
but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He
objected that forms of mass-produced 'faux' Gothic did not exemplify
his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the
style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a
building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his
disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to
revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen,
disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.

Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in
which he attacked 'laissez-faire' capitalism, which he thought was at
its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts
Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art
Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings.
Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a
logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value."
Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that
conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.
Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art
and architecture:

# Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in
making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling,
intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity,
all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept
as false and dehumanising as economic man.
# Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must
found itself on facts, which must be recognised for what they are. The
imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind
cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on
formulas or illusions.
# These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
# The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty
to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about
religion and the conduct of life.
# Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed
perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own
words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function.'
# This fulfilment of function depends on all parts of an organism
cohering and co-operating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,'
one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to
society.
# Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within
certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society,
and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important.
# Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a
common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their
leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.


Historic preservation
=======================
Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant
influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation
and restoration. His position at the beginning of his career was very
radical and he believed that if no conservation had been done on a
building it should be left to die. In 'The Seven Lamps of
Architecture', (1849) Ruskin wrote:



For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an
aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a
building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its
Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of
mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we
feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of
humanity."

It has been thought that he was a strong opponent of his contemporary,
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who promoted the view that "if no conservation
had been done [to] a building it should be restored". In fact, Ruskin
never criticised Viollet-le-Duc's restoration work, just the idea of
restoration. Ruskin's radical position on restoration became more
nuanced at the end of his life, as he wrote in his last book,
'Praeterita', that "he regretted that no one in England had done the
work that Viollet-le-Duc had done in France".


Critique of political economy
===============================
Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox,
19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it
failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations
(broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in 'The
Stones of Venice', and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such
as 'The Political Economy of Art' ('A Joy for Ever'), but he gave them
full expression in the influential and at the time of publication,
very controversial essays, 'Unto This Last'.




At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role
and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman,
in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the
economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in 'The Wealth of Nations'
had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the
worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow
workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment.

Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of
wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work
justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in
employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality
growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen
could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker
or product.

In the preface to 'Unto This Last' (1862), Ruskin recommended that the
state should underwrite standards of service and production to
guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of
government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and
'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops;
government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the
unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for
the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received
honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later
incorporated into the welfare state.


Turner's erotic drawings
==========================
Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed
that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by
Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend
Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was
said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In
2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate
Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who
concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.


Sexuality
===========
Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of
speculation. He was married once, to Effie Gray, whom he met when she
was 12 and he was 21, and Gray's family encouraged a match between the
two when she had matured. The marriage was annulled after six years
owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed
that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant:     He alleged various
reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve
my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason… that
he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and
that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was
disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848].   Ruskin
told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings:    It may be thought
strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so
attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not
formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain
circumstances in her person which completely checked it.  The cause of
Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated
that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her
pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form
only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic
hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was
frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair;
more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's
biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that
menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also
suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no
evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone
said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais
or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage],
remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy.
All three were perfectly blameless." Ruskins' marriage is the subject
of a book by Robert Brownell.

Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche began on 3 January
1858, when she was 10 years old and he was about to turn 39. He was
her private art tutor, and the two maintained an educational
relationship through correspondence until she was 18. Around that time
he asked her to marry him. However, Rose's parents forbade it, after
learning about his first marriage. Ruskin repeated his marriage
proposal when Rose became 21, and legally free to decide for herself.
She was willing to marry if the union would remain unconsummated,
because her doctors had told her she was unfit for marriage; but
Ruskin declined to enter another such marriage for fear of its effect
on his reputation.

Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships.
During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a
letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to
marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in
letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her
"girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:


Will you - (it's all for your own good - !) make her stand up and then
draw her for me without a cap - and, without her shoes, - (because of
the heels) and without her mittens, and without her - frock and
frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is - and - how - round. It
will be so good of and for you - And to and for me.


In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote:


I like my girls from ten to sixteen--allowing of 17 or 18 as long as
they're not in love with anybody but me.--I've got some darlings of
8--12--14--just now, and my Pigwiggina here--12--who fetches my wood
and is learning to play my bells.


Ruskin's biographers disagree about the allegation of "paedophilia".
Tim Hilton, in his two-volume biography, asserts that Ruskin "was a
paedophile", alluding by way of explanation to a sensual description
by Ruskin of a half-naked girl he saw in Italy and quoting Ruskin's
own statements about his liking for young girls, while John Batchelor
argues that the term is inappropriate because Ruskin's behaviour does
not "fit the profile". Others point to a definite pattern of
"nympholeptic" behaviour with regard to his interactions with girls at
a Winnington school. However, there is no evidence that Ruskin ever
engaged in any sexual activity with anyone at all. According to one
interpretation, what Ruskin valued most in pre-pubescent girls was
their innocence; the fact that they were not (yet) fully sexually
developed. However, James L. Spates describes Ruskin's erotic life as
simply "idiosyncratic" and concludes that he "was physically and
emotionally normal". The age of consent in the United Kingdom was 12
for females until 1875, 13 between 1875 and 1885, and 16 from 1885
onwards.


Common law of business balance
================================
Ruskin was not a fan of buying low and selling high. In the "Veins of
Wealth" section of 'Unto This Last', he wrote: "So far as I know,
there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human
intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, 'Buy in the
cheapest market and sell in the dearest,' represents, or under any
circumstances could represent, an available principle of national
economy." Perhaps due to such passages, Ruskin is frequently
identified as the originator of the "common law of business
balance"--a statement about the relationships of price and quality as
they pertain to manufactured goods, and often summarised as: "The
common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a
lot." This is the core of a longer statement usually attributed to
Ruskin, although Ruskin's authorship is disputed among Ruskin
scholars. Fred Shapiro maintains that the statement does not appear
anywhere in Ruskin's works, and George Landow is likewise sceptical of
the claim of Ruskin's authorship. In a posting of the 'Ruskin Library
News', a blog associated with the Ruskin Library (a major collection
of Ruskiniana located at Lancaster University), an anonymous library
staff member briefly mentions the statement and its widespread use,
saying that, "This is one of many quotations ascribed to Ruskin,
without there being any trace of them in his writings - although
someone, somewhere, thought they sounded like Ruskin." In an issue of
the journal 'Heat Transfer Engineering', Kenneth Bell quotes the
statement and mentions that it has been attributed to Ruskin. While
Bell believes in the veracity of its content, he adds that the
statement does not appear in Ruskin's published works.

Early in the 20th century, this statement appeared--without any
authorship attribution--in magazine advertisements, in a business
catalogue, in student publications, and, occasionally, in editorial
columns. Later in the 20th century, however, magazine advertisements,
student publications, business books, technical publications,
scholarly journals, and business catalogues often included the
statement with attribution to Ruskin.

In the 21st century, and based upon the statement's applicability of
the issues of quality and price, the statement continues to be used
and attributed to Ruskin--despite the questionable nature of the
attribution.

For many years, various Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlours prominently
displayed a section of the statement in framed signs: "There is hardly
anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell
a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that
man's lawful prey." The signs listed Ruskin as the author of the
statement, but the signs gave no information on where or when Ruskin
was supposed to have written, spoken, or published the statement. Due
to the statement's widespread use as a promotional slogan, and despite
questions of Ruskin's authorship, it is likely that many people who
are otherwise unfamiliar with Ruskin now associate him with this
statement.


                            Definitions
======================================================================
The OED credits Ruskin with the first quotation in 152 separate
entries. Some include:
* Pathetic fallacy: Ruskin coined this term in 'Modern Painters' III
(1856) to describe the ascription of human emotions to inanimate
objects and impersonal natural forces, as in "Nature must be gladsome
when I was so happy" (Charlotte Brontë, 'Jane Eyre').
* Fors Clavigera: Ruskin gave this title to a series of letters he
wrote "to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (1871-84). The
name was intended to signify three great powers that fashion human
destiny, as Ruskin explained at length in Letter 2 (February 1871).
These were: 'force', symbolised by the club ('clava') of Hercules;
'For'titude, symbolised by the key ('clavis') of Ulysses; and
'For'tune, symbolised by the nail ('clavus') of Lycurgus. These three
powers (the "fors") together represent human talents and abilities to
choose the right moment and then to strike with energy. The concept is
derived from Shakespeare's phrase "There is a tide in the affairs of
men/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (Brutus in
'Julius Caesar'). Ruskin believed that the letters were inspired by
the Third Fors: striking out at the right moment.
* Illth: Used by Ruskin as the antithesis of wealth, which he defined
as life itself; broadly, where wealth is 'well-being', illth is
"ill-being".
* Theoria: Ruskin's 'theoretic' faculty - theoretic, as opposed to
aesthetic - enables a vision of the beautiful as intimating a reality
deeper than the everyday, at least in terms of the kind of
transcendence generally seen as immanent in things of this world. For
an example of the influence of Ruskin's concept of theoria, see Peter
Fuller.
* Modern Atheism: Ruskin applied this label to "the unfortunate
persistence of the clerks in teaching children what they cannot
understand and employing young consecrated persons to assert in
pulpits what they do not know."
* Excrescence: Ruskin defined an "excrescence" as an outgrowth of the
main body of a building that does not harmonise well with the main
body. He originally used the term to describe certain Gothic Revival
features also for later additions to cathedrals and various other
public buildings, especially from the Gothic period.


In literature
===============
* Ruskin was the inspiration for either the Drawling Master or the
Gryphon in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865).
* Ruskin figures as Mr Herbert in 'The New Republic' (1878), a novel
by one of his Oxford undergraduates, William Mallock (1849-1923).
* 'False Dawn' (1924)',' a novella by Edith Wharton, was the first in
the 1924 'Old New York' series, and had the protagonist meet John
Ruskin.
*  A novel about the marriage of John Ruskin.
* Peter Hoyle's novel, 'Brantwood: The Story of an Obsession' (1986),
, is about two cousins who pursue their interest in Ruskin to his
Coniston home.
*  A novel in which Ruskin makes his last visit to Amiens cathedral in
1879.
*  A collection of short stories that includes 'Come, Gentle Night',
about Ruskin and Effie's wedding night.
* 'Manly Pursuits' (1999), Ruskin and the Hinksey diggings form the
backdrop to Ann Harries' novel.
* 'Sesame and Roses' (2007), a short story by Grace Andreacchi that
explores Ruskin's twin obsessions with Venice and Rose La Touche.
* Benjamin, Melanie (2010), 'Alice I Have Been'. . A fictionalized
account of the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for
Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the
Looking Glass'.
* 'Light, Descending' (2014), is a biographical novel about John
Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.


In other media
================
* 'The Love of John Ruskin' (1912), a silent movie about Ruskin, Effie
and Millais.
* 'Dante's Inferno' (1967), Ken Russell's biopic for television of
Rossetti, in which Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin
* 'The Love School' (1975), a BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelites,
starring David Collings (Ruskin), Anne Kidd (Effie), Peter Egan
(Millais).
* 'Dear Countess' (1983), a radio play by Elizabeth Morgan, with Derek
Jacobi (Ruskin), Bridget McCann (Gray), Timothy West (Old Mr Ruskin)
Michael Fenner (Millais). The author played Ruskin's mother.
* 'The Passion of John Ruskin' (1994), a film directed by Alex
Chapple.
* 'Parrots and Owls' (1994), a radio play by John Purser about
Ruskin's attempt to revive Gothic architecture and his connection to
the O'Shea brothers, with Michael Pennington in the role of Ruskin.
* 'Modern Painters' (1995), an opera about Ruskin by David Lang.
* 'The Countess' (1995), a play written by Gregory Murphy, dealing
with Ruskin's marriage.
* 'The Order of Release' (1998), a radio play by Robin Brooks about
Ruskin (Bob Peck), Effie (Sharon Small) and Millais (David Tennant).
* 'Mrs Ruskin' (2003), a play by Kim Morrissey dealing with Ruskin's
marriage.
* 'Desperate Romantics' (2009), a six-part BBC drama serial about the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin is played by Tom Hollander.
* 'Mr. Turner' (2014), a biopic of J. M. W. Turner directed by Mike
Leigh with Ruskin portrayed by Joshua McGuire.
* 'Effie Gray' (2014), a biopic about the Ruskin-Gray-Millais love
triangle, written by Emma Thompson, directed by Richard Laxton, and
featuring Greg Wise (Ruskin), Dakota Fanning (Gray) and Tom Sturridge
(Millais).
* 'Light, Descending' (2014), is a biographical novel about John
Ruskin by Octavia Randolph.


Paintings
===========
File:Lion's profile from life Ruskin.jpg|'Lion's profile'
File:View of Amalfi.jpeg|'View of Amalfi'
File:Ruskin Self Portrait with Blue Neckcloth.jpg|'Self Portrait with
Blue Neckcloth'
File:River Seine and its Islands, by John Ruskin.jpg|'River Seine and
its Islands'


File:Falls of Schaffhausen Ruskin.jpg|'Falls of Schaffhausen'
File:Rocks in Unrest.jpg|'Rocks in Unrest'
File:Fribourg Suisse Ruskin.jpg|'Fribourg Suisse'
File:Zermatt Ruskin.jpeg|'Zermatt'


Drawings
==========
File:Naples MET DP806039.jpg|'Naples'
File:John Ruskin - Turner’s Sunset seen from Goldau. 1855.jpg|'Sunset
seen from Goldau (after J. M. W. Turner)'
File:The Aiguille Blaitiere.jpg|'Aiguille de Blaitière'
File:Lauffenbourg - c 1863 corrected.jpg|'Lauffenbourg'


                            Bibliography
======================================================================
The standard, or
[https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/the-ruskin/the-complete-works-of-ruskin/
Library Edition] of Ruskin's 'Works' is  It is sometimes called simply
'Cook and Wedderburn'.


Works by Ruskin
=================
NB. The column marked LE gives the volume number in which the work
appears  in the
[https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/the-ruskin/the-complete-works-of-ruskin/
Library Edition] of 'The Works of John Ruskin', ed. E. T. Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols) (London: George Allen, 1903-1912).
Year    Title   LE       Notes
|1850   |'Poems'        |02     |written 1835-1846
|1837- 1838     |'The Poetry of Architecture'   |01     |serialised 'The
Architectural Magazine' 1837-38; authorised book, 1893)
|1894   'Letters to a College Friend'   |01     |written 1840-1845
|1850   |'The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers. A Legend
of Stiria'      |01     |written 1841
1843- 1860      |'Modern Painters'  (5 vols)    |03- 07
|1843   |'Modern Painters' 1:'Of General Principles and of Truth'       |03
Parts I and II
|1846   |'Modern Painters' 2: 'Of the Imaginative and Theoretic
Faculties'      |04     |Part III
|1856   |'Modern Painters' 3: 'Of Many Things'  |05     |Part IV
|1856   |'Modern Painters' 4: 'Mountain Beauty' |06     |Part V
|1860   |'Modern Painters' 5: 'Of Leaf Beauty', 'Of Cloud Beauty', 'Of
Ideas of Relation (1) Of Invention Formal', 'Of Ideas of Relation (2)
Of Invention Spiritual' |07     |Parts VI-IX
|1849   |'The Seven Lamps of Architecture'      |08
|1851- 1853     |'The Stones of Venice' (3 vols)        |09- 11
|[https://ruskinto-day.org/the-stones-of-venice/ Abridged audiobook by
Robert Hewison]
|1851   |'The Stones of Venice' 1: 'The Foundations'    |09
|1853           'The Stones of Venice' 2: 'The Sea-Stories'     |10     |with chapter
"The Nature of Gothic"
|1853   |'The Stones of Venice'  3: 'The Fall'  |11
|1851   |'Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds'      |12
|1851   |'Pre-Raphaelitism'     |12
|1851, 1854     |Letters to the 'Times' on the Pre-Raphaelite Artists
|12
|1854   |'Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853)'      |12
|1855- 1859, 1875       |'Academy Notes'        |14     reviews of the June Royal
Academy exhibitions
|1856   |'The Harbours of England'      |13
|1857   |'The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners'       |15
|1857, 1880     |'’A Joy Forever' and Its Price in the Market: being the
substance (with additions) of two lectures on The Political Economy of
Art'    |16
|1859   |'The Two Paths: being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to
Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858-9'        |16
|1859   |'The Elements of Perspective, Arranged for the Use of Schools
and Intended to be Read in Connection with the First Three Books of
Euclid' |15
|1862   |'Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of
Political Economy' '    |17     serialised 'Cornhill Magazine' 1860
|1872   |'Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political
Economy'        |17     |serialised 'Fraser's Magazine'
|1864   |'The Cestus of Aglaia'         |19     |serialised 'Art Journal' 1864,
incorporated (revised) in 'On the Old Road' (1882)
|1865   |'Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in
1864'   |18     |i.e., "Of Queens' Gardens" and "Of Kings' Treasuries"
(plus, edn of 1871, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts")
|1866   |'The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on
the Elements of Crystallisation'        |18     |lectures given to the girls at
Winnington Hall
|1866   |'The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and
War'    |18     |in a later edition, a fourth lecture (delivered 1869), "The
Future of England", was added
|1867   |'Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a
Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work'  |17     |letters to Thomas
Dixon
|1869   |'The Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and
Storm'  |19
|1870   |'Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in
Hilary term, 1870'      |20
|1872   |Aratra Pentelici: 'Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture
Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas term, 1870' |20
|1898   |'Lectures on Landscape, Delivered at Oxford in [Lent term|
Lent Term], 1871'       |22
|1871- 1884     |'Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of
Great Britain'  |27- 29 |originally collected in 8 vols., vols. 1-7
covering annually 1871-1877, and vol. 8, Letters 85-96, covering
1878-84
|1871- 1873             'Fors Clavigera 1: Letters 1-36'        |27
|1874- 1876     |'Fors Clavigera 2: Letters 37-72'      |28
|1877- 1884             'Fors Clavigera 3: Letters 73-96 (1877-1884) '  |29
|1872   |'The Eagle's Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural
science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent term,
1872'   |22
|1876   |'Ariadne Florentina': Six Lectures on Wood and Metal
Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford, in
Michaelmas Term, 1872'  |22
|1873- 1881     |'Love's Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds'   |25
|1874   |'Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, directly
antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories, given before the
University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873'  |23
|1906   |'The Aesthetic and Mathematic School of Art in Florence:
Lectures Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term,
1874'   |23
|1875- 1877     |'Mornings in Florence: Simple Studies of Christian Art,
for English Travellers' |23
|1875- 1883     |'Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and
Life of Stones'         |26
|1875- 1886     |'Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air
was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England Which My
Father Knew'    |25
|1876- 1888     |'Bibliotheca Pastorum'         |31- 32 i.e., 'Shepherd's
Library', edited by Ruskin
|1877- 1878     |'Laws of Fésole: A Familiar Treatise on the Elementary
Principles and Practice of Drawing and Painting as Determined by the
Tuscan Masters (arranged for the use of schools)'       |15
|1877- 1884     |'St Mark's Rest'       |24
|1880- 1881     |'Fiction, Fair and Foul'       |34     |serialised 'Nineteenth
Century' 1880-81, incorporated in 'On the Old Road' (1885))
|1880- 1885     |'The Bible of Amiens'  |33     |first part of 'Our Fathers
Have Told Us'
|1884   |'The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his
Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship'       |33     |delivered 1883
|1884   |'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures
Delivered at the London Institution, 4 and 11 February 1884'    |34
|1884- 1885     |'The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford,
During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship'    |33     |delivered
1884
|1885- 1889     |'Præterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps
Worthy of Memory in My Past Life' (3 vols)      |35
|'Dilecta: Correspondence, Diary Notes, and Extracts from Books,
Illustrating 'Praeterita**
|1886, 1887. 1900       |35


Selected diaries and letters
==============================
* 'The Diaries of John Ruskin' eds. Joan Evans and John Howard
Whitehouse (Clarendon Press, 1956-1959)
* 'The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin' ed. Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale
University Press, 1971)
* 'A Tour of the Lakes in Cumbria. John Ruskin's Diary for 1830' eds.
Van Akin Burd and James S. Dearden (Scolar, 1990)
* 'The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret
Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall' ed. Van Akin Burd
(Harvard University Press, 1969)
* 'The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin,
his wife, and their son John, 1801-1843' ed. Van Akin Burd (2 vols.)
(Cornell University Press, 1973)
* 'The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton' ed.
John Lewis Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
* 'The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin' ed. George
Allen Cate (Stanford University Press, 1982)
* 'John Ruskin's Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense
Letters' ed. Rachel Dickinson (Legenda, 2008)


Selected editions of Ruskin still in print
============================================
* 'Praeterita' [Ruskin's autobiography] ed. Francis O' Gorman (Oxford
University Press, 2012)
* 'Unto this Last: Four essays on the First Principles of Political
Economy' intro. Andrew Hill (Pallas Athene, 2010)
* 'Unto This Last And Other Writings' ed. Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1986)
* 'Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great
Britain' ed. Dinah Birch (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
* 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century' preface by Clive Wilmer
and intro. Peter Brimblecombe (Pallas Athene, 2012)
* 'The Nature of Gothic' (Pallas Athene, 2011) [facsimile reprint of
Morris's Kelmscott Edition with essays by Robert Hewison and Tony
Pinkney]
* 'Selected Writings' ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford University Press, 2009)
* 'Selected Writings' (originally 'Ruskin Today') ed. Kenneth Clark
(Penguin, 1964 and later impressions)
* 'The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings' ed. John
D. Rosenberg (George Allen and Unwin, 1963)
* 'Athena: Queen of the Air (Annotated)' (originally 'The Queen of the
Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm') ed. Na Ding,
foreword by Tim Kavi, brief literary bio by Kelli M. Webert (TiLu
Press, 2013 electronic book version, paper forthcoming)
*'Ruskin on Music' ed Mary Augusta Wakefield (Creative Media Partners
LLC, 2015)


                              See also
======================================================================
* Ruskin, Nebraska
* Ruskin's diggers in Ferry Hinksey (1874)
* Ruskin's Ride, a bridleway in Oxford
* Trenton, Missouri, home of the first Ruskin College in the United
States
* Charles Augustus Howell
* 'The English House'
* Mount Ruskin


                              Sources
======================================================================
* Robert Hewison, "Ruskin, John (1819-1900)", 'Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography' (ODNB) Oxford University Press, 2004; online
edition.
* Francis O'Gorman (1999), 'John Ruskin (Pocket Biographies)' (Sutton
Publishing)
* James S. Dearden (2004), 'John Ruskin' (Shire Publications)


General
=========
*
*Conner, Patrick. 'Savage Ruskin'. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
*Cook, E. T. 'Ruskin, John.' Dictionary of National Biography (1st
supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1901.
*Dearden, James S. 'John Ruskin's Bookplates.' The Book Collector
(1964) 13 no. 3 (autumn): 335-339.
*Dearden, J. S. 'The Production and Distribution of John Ruskin's
'Poems' 1850.' The Book Collector (1968)17 no 2 (summer): 151-167.
*Dearden, J. S. 'Wise and Ruskin.' The Book Collector (1969) 18.no.1
(spring): 45-56.
*Earland, Ada. 'Ruskin and His Circle'. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1910.
*Fellows, Jay. 'Ruskin's Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art'.
Princeton University Press, 1981.
*Freeman, Kelly; Hughes, Thomas, et al., eds.
[https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/courtauld-books-online/ruskins-ecologies-figures-of-relation-from-modern-painters-to-the-storm-cloud/
'Ruskin's Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The
Storm-Cloud']. The Courtauld, 2021.
* Gamble, Cynthia. 'Voix entrelacées de Proust et de Ruskin'. Paris:
Classiques Garnier, 2021. .
* Helsinger, Elizabeth K. 'Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder'.
Harvard University Press, 1982.
* Hewison, Robert. 'John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye'. Thames and
Hudson, 1976.
* Hugh, Chriholm, ed. 'Ruskin, John.' Encyclopædia Britannica (11th
ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1911.
* Jackson, Kevin. 'The Worlds of John Ruskin'. Pallas Athene, 2010.
* Murphy, Paul Thomas. 'Falling Rocket: James Whistler, John Ruskin,
and the Battle for Modern Art'. New York: Pegasus Books, Ltd., 2023. .
* Quigley, Carroll. 'Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our
Time'. GSG & Associates, 1966.
* Quill, Sarah. 'Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited'. Ashgate,
2000.
* Rosenberg, J. G. 'The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's
Genius'. Columbia University Press, 1961.
*
* Viljoen, Helen Gill. 'Ruskin's Scottish Heritage: A Prelude'.
University of Illinois Press, 1956.
* Waldstein, C. 'The Work of John Ruskin: Its Influence Upon Modern
Thought and Life', Harper's magazine vol. 78, no. 465 (Feb. 1889), pp.
382-418.
* Woolf, Virginia, "Ruskin", in 'The Captain's Death Bed and Other
Essays'. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1950.


Biographies of Ruskin
=======================
* W. G. Collingwood (1893)
'[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100765899 The Life and Work of
John Ruskin 1-2]'. Methuen. ('The Life of John Ruskin', sixth edition
(1905).) - Note that the title was slightly changed for the 1900 2nd
edition and later editions.
* E. T. Cook (1911) 'The Life of John Ruskin 1-2'. George Allen. ('The
Life of John Ruskin', vol. 1 of the second edition (1912); 'The Life
of John Ruskin', vol. 2 of the second edition (1912))
* Derrick Leon (1949) 'Ruskin: The Great Victorian' (Routledge &
Kegan Paul)
* Joan Abse (1981) 'John Ruskin: A Passionate Moralist'. (Alfred A.
Knopf)
* Tim Hilton (1985) 'John Ruskin: The Early Years' (Yale University
Press)
* John Dixon Hunt (1998) 'The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin'
(Phoenix Giant)
* Tim Hilton (2000) 'John Ruskin: The Later Years' (Yale University
Press)
* John Batchelor (2000) 'John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life' (Chatto
& Windus)
* Robert Hewison (2007) 'John Ruskin' (Oxford University Press)


                           External links
======================================================================
* [http://ruskinto-day.org/ Ruskin To-Day]
* [http://theeighthlampruskinstudiestoday.blogspot.com/ 'The Eighth
Lamp, Ruskin Studies Today']. Ruskin journal
*
*
* [https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ruskins-italy-ruskins-england
'Ruskin’s Italy, Ruskin’s England'] 2000-2001 exhibit at the Morgan
Library & Museum


Library collections
=====================
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150923210558/http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/search?keywords=ruskin&search_form_submit=Go
UK Museum, Library and Archive collections relating to Ruskin] at
Cornucopia.org.uk. Retrieved
*
[http://ufdc.ufl.edu/juv/results/?t=,,john+ruskin,&f=ZZ,+TI,+AU,+TO
John Ruskin texts] in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's
Literature Digital Collection. Retrieved 2010-10-19


Electronic editions
=====================
*
[https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/the-ruskin/the-complete-works-of-ruskin/
The Complete Works of John Ruskin] from The Ruskin at Lancaster
University
*
*
*
*
*
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070929092242/http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/podcasts/pre-raphaelitism_ruskin.aspx
Liverpool Museums audio files on Ruskin]


Archival material
===================
*
*
[http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/artist-biography/john-ruskin/
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's online biography and gallery] .
Retrieved 2010-10-19
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20131030000512/https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/libraries/archives-and-local-studies/research-guides/john-ruskin
Sources for the Study of John Ruskin and the Guild of St George].
Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives.
*
*
* Archival material at
* [https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4079287
Finding aid to John Ruskin letters at Columbia University. Rare Book
& Manuscript Library.]
* John Ruskin Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University.
* Sharp Collection-manuscripts, letters,artifacts.
** Burd, Van Akin, "Frederick James Sharp: 1880-1957." 'The Book
Collector' 44 (no 4) Winter 1995: 543-573.


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