John Ruskin

Biography

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English writer, art critic, art historian, and social thinker whose writings shaped Victorian views on art, architecture, and political economy. Born in London to a wealthy wine merchant father and a devoutly evangelical mother, Ruskin was raised in a setting that nurtured both an appreciation for beauty and strong moral values. He was educated at home before attending King's College London and later Christ Church, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1839. His early travels across Britain and Europe, especially to the Alps and Venice, left lasting impressions that influenced his work for many years.

Ruskin first gained public attention with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843. In it, he made a strong case for the landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, arguing that an artist's main duty was to stay true to nature, based on close observation and direct experience. The work eventually grew into five volumes over seventeen years, moving beyond a defense of Turner to an exploration of the principles of great art. His major architectural studies, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), expanded his ideas to buildings, suggesting that great architecture showed the moral and spiritual state of the society that created it. The Stones of Venice notably introduced the idea that Gothic architecture highlighted the freedom and vitality of medieval craftsmen, a concept that greatly influenced the Arts and Crafts movement.

From the late 1850s, Ruskin focused more on social and economic issues. Unto This Last, first published as essays in 1860 and collected in 1862, critiqued classical political economy, challenging the idea that wealth was only financial and emphasizing the importance of human welfare and dignity. The book was initially not well-received but later became a key work of social criticism, reportedly influencing Mahatma Gandhi and early figures in the British Labour movement. Ruskin continued this social critique in Fors Clavigera, a series of monthly letters to the working men and laborers of Great Britain, published from 1871 to 1884.

In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he encouraged drawing as a form of observation and established the Ruskin School of Drawing. His personal life was quite troubled. His marriage to Effie Gray in 1848 was annulled in 1854, and Effie later married Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. In his later years, Ruskin suffered from recurring mental illness, spending his last decade mostly in seclusion at Brantwood, his home on Coniston Water's shores in the Lake District, where he passed away on 20 January 1900.