1890 Thackeray IMPRESSIONS OF JOHN RUSKIN - Praeterita

John Ruskin (1819-1900) is best known for his work as an art critic and social critic, but is remembered as an author, poet and artist as well. Ruskin's essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Son of a wealthy wine merchant, he was brought up in a cultured and religious family, but his mother's over protectiveness undoubtedly contributed to his later psychological troubles. On his frequent trips in Europe, he took an artists's and poet's delight both in landscape and works of art, especially medieval and Renaissance. His first great work, "Modern Painters", began as a passionate defence of Turner's pictures, but became a study of the principles of Art. In "The Seven Lamps Of Architecture" and "The Stones Of Venice" he similarly treated the fundamentals of architecture. These principles enabled him, incidentally, to appreciate and defend the Pre-Raphaelites, then the target of violence and abuse. To Ruskin the relationship between art, morality and social justice was of paramount importance and he increasingly became preoccupied with social reform.

Gothic was for Ruskin the expression of an integrated and spiritual civilisation; classicism represented paganism and corruption; the use of cast iron, and the increasing importance of function in architecture and engineering seemed to him a lamentable trend. He was Slade Professor of art at Oxford. His later works, "Sesame and Lillies", "The Crown Of Wild Olives" and "Fors Clavigera", contain the programme of social reform in which he was so interested.

Intimate Recollections of John Ruskin - Influential Modern Thinker!

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