John ruskin best biography

RUSKIN, JOHN (1819–1900), major British critic of art and architecture and influential political writer.

John Ruskin was born in London on 8 February 1819, the only child of Scottish parents who had settled in London and made good. His parents were powerful influences, for good and ill, in his life. His mother was an evangelical Christian who destined her son for a career in the Church of England, and from infancy he was made to read and memorize the Bible with this formidable and extremely narrow matriarch. Margaret Ruskin adored her son, but she smothered him emotionally, and many of the sexual and psychological problems that dogged his later life can reasonably be seen as having their roots in her unwise treatment of him.

Ruskin's father, John James Ruskin, was very different. An extremely wealthy wine merchant and typical Victorian self-made man, John James was widely read in the literature of his young manhood (especially Sir Walter Scott [1771–1832] and Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron, 1788–1824]), and he was a willing patron of the arts; by the 1860s his collection of paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was the most important in the world. John James Ruskin acted in effect as John Ruskin's editor and literary agent, eagerly promoting his brilliant son's writing, paying for publication of his work, and in a sense acting as his son's personal assistant. John James's death in 1864 removed an essential prop from Ruskin's life. Margaret's death in 1871, by contrast, removed an impediment. Only when he was rid of her could Ruskin, now a very rich man, set up his own home, at Brantwood on Lake Coniston, where he spent the happiest periods of what remained of his very troubled life.

As a parvenu and tradesman, John James was determined to buy social status for his son by sending him to Christ Church, Oxford, as a "gentleman commoner" (a status normally reserved for aristocrats). John Ruskin's social radicalism, which came to dominate his work after 1860, may be said to date back to his judgments on the manners and morals of these arrogant young men from the ruling class who were his familiars at Oxford.

In 1843 Ruskin, aged only twenty-four, became famous with the publication of first volume of Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters. This huge study, published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860, proclaimed itself from its opening pages as the work of a young lion determined to sweep away established attitudes to, and preferences for, painting. Turner's late paintings were misunderstood by reviewers in the early 1840s, and the strength of Ruskin's work was to argue that Turner's work displayed the natural world as God had made it. This appeal to creationist theology gave Ruskin's revolution irresistible authority in the eyes of the new middle class (people like his father) who had the money to buy art. Turner's reputation and fortune were made by Ruskin, and within a few years the careers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (Dante Gabriel Rossetti [1828–1882], Holman Hunt [1827–1910], and John Everett Millais [1829–1896]) were also established in effect by Ruskin's hugely influential advocacy.

With The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), Ruskin became as powerful a critic of architecture as he was of painting. The central argument was, again, couched in an appeal to Christian authority: the Gothic style was the style of the early, humble, Christian world, and was therefore the right style for any building which wished to be taken seriously. The point of Gothic architecture for Ruskin was that it was democratic, flexible, and universal. He also managed to argue that it was instinctively "Protestant," despite the fact that the great exemplar of the form, medieval Venice, was, obviously, rooted in Catholic Europe. He arrived at this position on Venetian Gothic by a historical sleight-of-hand: because Venice of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries was a republic and politically independent of the papacy, it could be seen in this argument as the forerunner of the Protestant resistance to Rome that developed in northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An extraordinary example of Ruskinian Gothic is the Oxford University Museum, created by Ruskin's friend Henry Acland (1815–1900, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford) in the 1850s. Ruskin's arguments ensured that a building based on the style of medieval structures devoted to Christianity was considered the obvious, and ideal, place for the study of geology, medicine, and the natural sciences, despite the fact that in the eyes of Oxford Movement theologians (such as Edward Bouverie Pusey [1800–1882]) science was the mortal enemy of religion.

In 1858 Ruskin lost his faith. He underwent what he called an "unconversion" in Turin, and from 1860 onward he devoted himself substantially to politics, especially in his brilliant and provocative essays published as Unto This Last (1861), which famously contains his anticapitalist battle-cry "There is no Wealth but Life." Ruskin followed this with his grand political project published serially from 1871 until the 1880s (with interruptions), called Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. Concurrently with these political and social writings he created his own utopia in the Guild of St. George, a medieval-style agrarian society designed to offer a radical alternative to the hard and aggressive competitiveness of mainstream Victorian capitalism. He also served as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford from 1869 to 1878 and again from 1883 to 1885.

Ruskin's personal life was notoriously unhappy. His marriage to Effie Gray in 1848 was annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation in 1854, and Effie then married Ruskin's former friend and protégé Millais (Millais went on to huge commercial fame and success, and he and Effie had eight children). His intense friendship with Rossetti was cruelly disappointing; Ruskin lavished money and affection on Rossetti, who responded with what is reasonable to regard as callous ingratitude and insensitivity. Later he was to lavish similar patronage on Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–1898), who was more responsive (and greatly benefited from Ruskin's support). In the late 1850s Ruskin fell in love with a little girl, Rose La Touche (she was ten years old), for whom he nurtured a consuming passion until Rose's early death in 1875. He suffered a period of complete insanity in 1878 and thereafter seems to have suffered bipolar disorder punctuated by periods of raving and violent derangement. His cousin Joan Severn became his companion and, when he was really mad, custodian, in these later years. Despite his illness, Ruskin wrote his magnificent and indispensable autobiography, Praeterita (1885–1889). This was his last work: he was silent for the last ten years of his life and died at Brantwood in 1900.

The opposition to capitalism set out in Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera made Ruskin hugely popular with late Victorian socialists, especially his disciple William Morris (1834–1896). Through Morris, Ruskin's work came to be seen in the 1890s as a bible of modern socialism. Ruskin was the central Victorian philanthropist, a man who could not find happiness for himself but passionately believed that it could be available to others. His influence is still seen in Victorian painting and architecture, and felt in the policies of successive socialist governments from the early days of the British Labour Party (the first Labour MPs named Ruskin as their leading influence). His intellectual and political heirs worldwide included Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948).

See alsoMorris, William; Pre-Raphaelite Movement; Turner, J. M. W.

bibliography

Batchelor, John. John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life. London, 2000.

Birch, Dinah. Ruskin's Myths. Oxford, U.K., 1988.

——. Ruskin on Turner. London, 1990.

Blau, Eve. Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845–1861. Princeton, N.J., 1982.

Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Princeton, N.J., 1976.

Hilton, Tim. John Ruskin. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1985, 2000.

Wheeler, Michael. Ruskin's God. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

John Batchelor