john ruskin biography book

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The best books on John Ruskin

Recommended by michael glover.

John Ruskin: An Idiosyncratic Dictionary Encompassing his Passions, his Delusions and his Prophecies by Michael Glover

As a believer in the humanising nature of proper work, the virtues of sustained attention and the value of aesthetics as the keystone to ideals for a truly prosperous society, John Ruskin's abiding concerns are still very much with us today. On the bicentenary of this eminent Victorian's birth, Michael Glover , author of the idiosyncratic Ruskin Dictionary , explains why we should still be reading Ruskin closely in the twenty first century.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

The Life of John Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood

Ruskin Today by Kenneth Clark

John Ruskin: A Life in Pictures by James S. Dearden

Effie in Venice by Mary Lutyens

The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton by Charles Eliot Norton

1 The Life of John Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood

2 ruskin today by kenneth clark, 3 john ruskin: a life in pictures by james s. dearden, 4 effie in venice by mary lutyens, 5 the correspondence of john ruskin and charles eliot norton by charles eliot norton.

J ohn Ruskin was England’s most prominent art critic in the Victorian era. Although this sells him short. He was also a patron of the arts, an artist, a prominent social thinker and activist. Ruskin wrote numerous books, on everything from botany to political economy. Why is he still important 200 years after his birth?

To mark the bicentenary, I helped to curate a recent show at Two Temple Place in London, that marvellous Arts & Crafts building created for the Astor family on the Embankment, which ran during the spring of this year. I was asked to try and bring Ruskin alive for the 21st century by  Martin Caiger-Smith, who runs the curating course at the Courtauld, and is art consultant to 2 Temple Place. The chief curator was based in Sheffield, where Ruskin created his only museum in the English regions. The idea was that the best of the Sheffield collection should be brought down to London, where there would be a general presentation of Ruskin and his ideas, so that we might all begin to be able to understand him again, to understand who he was, why he was significant, when he was significant, and why he deserves to be looked at with great seriousness now.

“Ruskin had been somehow lost in sepia, unlike other great Victorians.”

That was the task, and I was brought in because we had a general view, Martin and I, that Ruskin was somehow lost in sepia, unlike other great Victorians. Why was this the case? The fact is that Ruskin’s own works are not greatly and widely read. In fact, when I first started to look into this, I discovered it was almost impossible to find any Ruskin books in Cambridge, where I was once a student. In fact, the only book I could find there was a copy of Kenneth Clark’s anthology, Ruskin Today , in the local Oxfam shop. So bringing Ruskin alive now, that for me was the challenge of the exhibition—not only to show off the wonderment of his works and  his ideas, but to try and discover who exactly the man himself had been. He was so much more than just an embodiment of his own ideas.

Why do we know so little about him in comparison in comparison with other eminent Victorians? Why do we care so little about Ruskin himself, in comparison with our care for George Eliot and Tolstoy, and other contemporaries of his? In part, it was to do with the nature of the kind of work he was writing—art criticism and social criticism—which is obviously not so fashionable, nor so engaging or so easy to read. This was the challenge, bringing Ruskin alive now.

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One of the ways to bring him to life was to find out who exactly he was. We felt that he had somehow been lost within what is understood to be the nature of his ideas. He had set forth his ideas clearly, even stridently. Ruskin, the man, and the way he related to the world in which he lived, was less evident. And so we brought him alive in various ways. I wrote the interpretative texts. I wrote the timeline and I also was keen to find many photographic images of Ruskin, as many as we could find for the exhibition, again in order to bring him alive as a human being. I also created two large panels of quotations called Ruskin’s Loathings. He hated iron railings, Wagner, bicycling, even the railway network—in spite of the fact that he used it a great deal. In short, he was quite an an eccentric.

This gives you terrific fodder for compiling a dictionary.

I’ve always delighted in dictionaries and especially unusual dictionaries, such as those by Ambrose Bierce and Flaubert, Voltaire , Raymond Williams , all those really wayward dictionaries, which seem to be very authoritative, although in fact they’re highly personal, very unusual, and quite full of surprises. Bran tubs of surprises, in fact. Given what I was discovering about Ruskin, his multifariousness, he seemed to me a very suitable subject for a dictionary. That’s how the two came together.

Your dictionary is intriguingly subtitled ‘Passions, Delusions and Prophecies’. One thing that comes across very clearly in its pages are his many self-contradictions, but Ruskin also comes across as a more witty, amusing, curious, and eccentric fellow than perhaps some of his more ponderous writings in his books would suggest.

Let’s start with perhaps the most prominent Ruskinian, Collingwood, who studied under Ruskin, and ended up spending a lot of time with him, traveling around Europe and serving as his secretary until Ruskin’s death in 1900. 

There have been so many biographies of Ruskin, short and long, new and old. One of the shortest—a very good one—is by James Dearden. The longest by far is a recent one by Tim Hilton, which is a two-volume affair. What I wanted for my dictionary—and for my endeavours in the exhibition—was to bring myself  as close as possible to Ruskin by seeing him through the eyes of a man who knew him very well during his own lifetime—such as his secretary. This is why Collingwood was so important to me. You can feel Ruskin breathingly alive in that book. In fact, the copy of Collingwood that I bought, which dates from 1900 (the year of Ruskin’s death), even had newspaper cuttings from around that period—including an interview with Ruskin’s chief carer, Joan Severn. I felt extremely close to Collingwood as a result of that, and a very real sense of being close to Ruskin himself, and his unusual habits, and especially, for example, in Collingwood’s wonderful description of the musical evenings at Brantwood, I thought all this was absolutely wonderful.

Ruskin championed the elevating effects of making art first-hand. And he believed that just as anyone could learn mathematics, or another language, so anyone would be able to learn to draw. It was only a matter of practice, a matter of looking. That aesthetic experience is central to his entire philosophy. Like Ruskin, Collingwood was a practicing painter, which also puts him in a particularly good position to assess, evaluate, and champion Ruskin’s output, not just as a writer, but also as an artistic practitioner.

One of the things that Kenneth Clark points out in his book about Ruskin, was that he may have been seen as difficult to like in his own day for the very fact that he championed a radical artist like Turner. Contemporary audiences perhaps weren’t ready for radicalism of that sort in the arts. 

What’s also fascinating is that Ruskin was championing Turner, almost in spite of Turner himself. Turner wasn’t especially excited by Ruskin battening onto him in this way, year after year. Ruskin’s father was furious that Ruskin was barely even acknowledged after Turner’s death. He left him not a farthing in his will. And still Ruskin did all this bloody hard work on his behalf. You could call it a thankless task, Ruskin’s obsessive dedication to the cause of Turner. It’s all so fascinating.

Turner was maybe a little bit freaked out being described as the angel of the apocalypse.

I’m sure he was. Anybody would be freaked out by Ruskin’s extraordinary descriptions of them. They’d be overwhelmed by them, lucky to be praised rather than dispraised perhaps—but it was tricky to be praised by Ruskin.

Clark himself is an interesting figure and in some ways similar to Ruskin. He’s become somewhat outmoded, though maybe is having a bit of a reevaluation. Like Ruskin, he was a brilliant wordsmith, which comes across clearly in his books.

Very much so. Also he was following in Ruskin’s footsteps, Ruskin was the very first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Clark held that same position in the 20th century. Clark was passionately interested in Ruskin’s inaugural lecture as Slade Professor, and what it reveals to us about Ruskin’s passionate defence of the expansion of the British Empire. All deeply unfashionable stuff, of course. There are great parallels between the two men. As you say, Clark himself is now very much outmoded, but he was perhaps less so in 1964 when this book was first published. The interesting thing is, this book is still the authoritative anthology in my view. It was also the first anthology of Ruskin’s writings that I read, and I thought it absolutely wonderful, in so far as it showed us the extraordinary range of the man, which would be much more difficult to find and to fully appreciate if you were simply reading through Ruskin’s own works in 4o volumes…. Especially those that he wrote when he was very young. Why? Because he was at his most dreary and biblical and ponderous when he was very young and he got lighter of touch as he got older. When he was off his guard, writing letters for example, he could be a bit more light-hearted.

Here are two individuals of extraordinary erudition and prolific output, and also both great popularisers of the arts.

Let’s talk about A Life in Pictures by James Dearden . I loved flipping through this book. Ruskin was depicted so many times by so many different artists, there are so many likenesses of his made in the two centuries that have elapsed since his birth. This is almost like a pictorial potted biography of Ruskin, based on those portraits.

It really is. What I find so extraordinary about it is all you learn from it, almost incidentally, from the detailed commentary, which seems to flow out so serendipitously. When I was first given a spare copy of this book in Sheffield—it had been out of print for years—I thought at first that it didn’t sound very interesting. But in fact, when I began to read it, and subsequently got in touch with James Dearden himself – he’s still very much alive, living on the Isle of Wight—I found him to be a veritable encyclopedia of Ruskiniana. Everything tumbles out of him. When I asked him whether he knew anything about Ruskin’s visits to Sheffield, he immediately said, ‘well I do know that he was in touch with Councillor Bragge in 1875′. That was immediate and quite spontaneous. James gave me a tremendous amount of help with my research into Ruskin in Sheffield in particular. My contribution to the Ruskin in Sheffield catalogue was to write an essay about Ruskin’s engagements with Sheffield, which I was delighted to do as I’m a Sheffielder myself.

A Life in Pictures is also an extraordinarily wacky biography as well. What James did through sometimes bizarre and manifold researches, was to reveal to us the nature of Ruskin’s interest in his own self-portraiture. This all is absolutely fascinating and really delightful, right down to those minute descriptions of his teeth and his fingernails. He brings everything about the man alive so well. And his clothing gets close treatment. Ruskin was very particular about his own appearance, and he would be dismayed to find himself portrayed in ways which he did not find flattering.

His relationship with numerous other individuals in his life was also strange. Not least of all his relationship with his wife. It was something of an arranged marriage. Tell us about the extraordinary correspondence of his wife Effie Gray, much of it written while traveling in Venice? 

I picked up this book and I thought, ‘This is the last thing I want to read. I know how uninteresting this will be . . .’ Yet it was one of the most insightful books that I read. To get a view on Ruskin from the woman who was living and breathing with him twenty-four hours a day, for this relatively short period of time, was a revelation. The crass view of her, perhaps particularly among die-hard Ruskinians, is that this woman deserves to be dismissed as an air-headed socialite. In fact, this is far from the case. She was far cleverer than this. She was also a very different sort of person from Ruskin himself, which is what makes the contrast all the more interesting. Effie could be very flighty, and she did love society, dressing up, dancing, in fact all the things that Ruskin completely abhorred. But her insights into the way he behaved, worked and conducted himself and how he treated other people, make for an absolutely fascinating read.

It helps us to build a wonderful, varied portrait of Ruskin the man. He would dismiss people without a second’s hesitation. He often really had no interest in them. He would meet someone, and on the following day forget he’d ever met them. On one occasion, he is reported as making this wonderful remark: I have to turn up to dinner today, in order to prove that I’m not a myth. These are delightfully revelatory things that Effie manages to tell us about him, and incidentally, she reminds us that she’s clever enough in her own right. She describes how she’s learning German, she knows Italian, feels that her French is not up to scratch as far as she’s concerned. We’re talking about a woman who is no pushover, intellectually.

We learn an awful lot about the unguarded Ruskin by reading her letters, his weaknesses and foibles, his impulsive collecting habits, the money he would spend (often his father’s) on flights of fancy such as casts of  sculpture and all sorts of other stuff, and having them shipped back to England, constantly. He was spending absurd amounts of money, and were it not for these letters of Effie’s, we might not be unaware of the extent of his compulsive behaviour. It’s an insightful commentary upon the nature of the man himself, and how he proceeded through life, pleasing himself.

She’s a very lively foil to the somber, serious and rather solitary Ruskin.

Speaking of seriousness, the correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton , by turn, was in some instances very profoundly serious, to the point where his correspondent felt it necessary, as the executer of Ruskin’s estate after his death, to destroy some of the correspondences as being too revealing. 

Yes, it is extremely significant. This correspondence really shocked me, because it showed us Ruskin talking to another man in a completely open-handed, open-hearted way, which was something he was incapable of doing with so many other people, even those—or perhaps especially those—who were closest to him. What fascinates me, moreover, is that he was writing so candidly to an American. With an Englishman’s reserve in the nineteenth century, such candour is almost unthinkable. What’s more, Ruskin was so condemning of America and American habits—take for example his denunciations of that poor family he travelled with to Verona, an episode which I describe in the dictionary. However he opens his heart to Norton in a way that he scarcely does to anybody else. It’s quite extraordinary to see the lengths to which he goes to expose himself, his own limitations, his own humiliations, his own anxieties about himself. Even his own lust to do things that he’s incapable of doing.

Take for example a wonderful letter where he says, ‘I want, I want, I want’ . . . His manic delivery is striking, and he’s baring his soul in a way that he scarcely does anywhere else, and certainly not in his public lectures or in his public persona. It’s an amazing insight into the man himself, the way he responds to Norton.

There’s a kind of manic energy that runs through Ruskin’s life and work, some of which is captured in these letters. So much of it in fact, that arguably the man became unhinged in later years.

I think he did become unhinged in later years. It was partly due to the fact that he seems to have had no control of his emotional life. He would sometimes respond to women as if someone had thrown a brick at him. He doesn’t know how to cope with emotions, partly because of his difficult relationship with his parents. He was a man-child all his life. He was very subservient to his parents, he would never criticise them and didn’t know how to get beyond them. They were forever interfering in his life, as Effie tells us all the time in her letters. Ruskin doesn’t really grow up, but he is also this towering intellect, perpetually questing in all directions and never able to stop, until something stops him, and he collapses. Eventually he breaks down into complete madness, as a result of a tragic affair with Rose La Touche. Her mother invited him to give her drawing lessons, when she was nine years old. That’s how it all began, his complete infatuation with the girl.

Interestingly, she didn’t welcome the way he wanted to get close to her at all when she was young. I’m very much aware of this having read around the subject, although the way it’s often been described means that you’re not necessarily aware of this. I don’t think anything terrible went on between them at all. Nevertheless, he made it clear that he wanted to marry her, and he had to contend with the appalling involvement of her mother, who was almost certainly attracted to him, too. It’s tragically bizarre, the whole arcane thing. He seems to be heading for a fall all the time. His manic nature suggests that he doesn’t really have any emotional ballast. This to me seems to be the problem.

What I find extraordinary, considering how topsy-turvy he was in his personal life, his emotional life, his mental state, is the stillness and poise that we find in so many of his drawings and paintings. They’re terrifically well observed, almost contemplative studies of nature, of simple objects—stones, architectural details. It makes for such a contrast to what must’ve been going on, on some emotional, psychological level.

It is absolutely extraordinary that there is this total difference, that he can concentrate on a stone or a tree, and analyse it with such thoroughness and somehow find a point of stillness within himself, which enables him to pour forth everything about what he’s doing at that moment. But nothing beyond it. It is truly remarkable. I suppose that’s part of what we call his genius, the fact that he can still this emotional turbulence for a moment. In fact, he does say of his writing that it was consolatory. Although we know what his nature was like, he always said in his correspondence that his writing was a steady affair. In contrast to his friend Thomas Carlyle, writing was not a tumultuous, difficult business for Ruskin. He could move through it steadily and regularly. I think the very act of writing and finding these wondrously still moments of experience, both helped to keep him together.

Let’s speak about Ruskin’s contemporary relevance from a political standpoint. He’s been championed as a kind of precursor to socialism for some of his ideas, championing the working man. Technology was a bane to him, but he also saw in it the promise of liberating the working class, something that may find resonance in contemporary debates about the threat—or potential—of artificial intelligence and robots replacing workers. There’s a lot that rings true in what we read in Ruskin’s books today.

The humanising nature of proper work is central to Ruskin’s message. This is something that he begins to write about in the 1860s, and features very prominently in Unto This Last . It was something that his father was completely repelled by. He wanted Ruskin to concentrate on art criticism, not to stray into the social or political, which he felt were dangerous subjects. And of course they did prove dangerous in that tumultuous century. Take his contemporary William Morris, who championed a return to the hand-crafted as an antidote to industrial manufacture. Morris was a socialist and Ruskin certainly wasn’t, but they share a sensibility. In spite of the fact that Ruskin was a true blue conservative in so many respects, he was very much mindful of the exploitation of capitalism.

Ruskin was coming at the idea of communism from a totally different perspective from that of Marx. He defended the idea of holding important principles in common and doing work which is not exploitative, work which does us good, in the same way that he believed art is health-giving. All these matters are utterly relevant for today.

And the aesthetic side of things is inseparable from political considerations. In a way, Ruskin couldn’t take his father’s advice to heart because he believed that these elements—art and politics—are closely intertwined.

Absolutely. His work, even on matters artistic, bleeds into the political. That’s one reason why he was at such odds with John Stuart Mill, the idea that economics is some kind of disembodied, inevitable thing. Actually, economics has to do with the way you treat human beings and the way they behave in relation to each other. That was the message.

Would you consider yourself a prominent Ruskinian now?

I’m not a Ruskinian, nor have I ever been a Ruskinian really, but I’ve always read Ruskin and cared for his writing. That attachment to his writings really deepened over the last two or three years. I first became interested in Ruskin when I was young because there had once been a museum in Sheffield, although by the time I was a young boy that museum had been dispersed. The collections themselves were for the most part in storage in Reading when I was a boy, and they did not return to Sheffield until recently. Nonetheless, there were a few items from that original collection that stayed in Sheffield, and one of these created my very first link to Ruskin—it was my very first glimpse of him, you might say—when I used to visit Sheffield’s Mappin Art Gallery during my childhood. There I saw a drawing by Ruskin of a peacock’s feather. It was something I went to see again and again, well into my teens, in order to to marvel at the way in which he seemed to have rendered a peacock feather with such a minute attention to detail. I had never seen a feather painted like that. My only hands-on experience of feathers was to do with pillow fights, and the way that feathers floated up into in the air when you hit your sister with a pillow. It never really occurred to me at that moment of combat in our bedroom that a feather might be a very particular thing, which you might admire very minutely, and which might be painted in the hues of heaven, as this peacock feather seemed to be, and which struck me as absolutely extraordinary. It was a lesson from Ruskin about close observation. Close looking, close observation, help you to see the world in a way that you had never seen it before. To appreciate small things such as stones, as you have never appreciated them before. I learned this important lesson when I was a teenager by looking at this painting of the peacock’s feather, which is still in Sheffield to this day. So that kind of makes me a Ruskinian in spite of myself, does it not? Even though I wouldn’t readily accept the label, he has made me a disciple of acute looking.

In our attention deficit times, close looking is certainly something that deserves greater prominence.

There’s no one who forces us to pay attention to everything that surrounds us more clearly than Ruskin himself.

The Ruskin Dictionary is a great primer for people looking for books to get acquainted with Ruskin’s thought. For those who are braced for it, what would be your recommendation for the first work to read by Ruskin himself, for somebody who is otherwise unacquainted with Ruskin.

There is one of Ruskin’s books that I would read before anything else—his autobiography, which is called Praeterita . He wrote it when he was in his eighties. It was really his last major project, and it was finished by his cousin and carer Joan Severn, who edited it for publication, and even censored it. This is the book I would recommend to anybody to begin with, because it’s less cluttered, less convoluted, less theoretical, less difficult to read. In fact, it’s a wonderful read, even if it is not an entirely truthful book, in so far as Ruskin is remembering his past very selectively. He’s largely remembering his childhood—his later life gets much less attention—and even that he is often misremembering, describing the nature of his aloneness in ways which are not entirely true, because he was not completely alone. He likes to pretend that he was, in order perhaps to concentrate on his own uniqueness.

It is a wonderful, lyrical book and it is composed of single, long paragraphs, which are delightful, like prolonged exercises in lyricism. The very last section of it is like something out of Ezra Pound’s Cantos , a complete delight to read. It can be read spasmodically, so you don’t feel you have to be limbering up every morning to read another 50 pages of Ruskin. You can read it quite casually, bit by bit, and it’s an absolute delight, end to end.

December 19, 2019

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Michael Glover

Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-educated, London-based poet and art critic, and poetry editor of  The Tablet . He has written regularly for the  Independent , the  Times , the  Financial Times , the  New Statesman  and the  Economist . He has also been a London correspondent for ARTNews, New York. His latest books are:  Late Days  (2018),  Hypothetical May Morning  (2018),  Neo Rauch  (2019),  The Book of Extremities  (2019),  What You Do With Days  (2019) and  John Ruskin: a dictionary  (2019).

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John Ruskin by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0060

Best known as a theorist, critic, and historian of visual culture, John Ruskin (1819–1900) wrote prolifically and influentially about a wide array of other topics. He championed the eminent English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, inspired and provided the theoretical basis for both the Pre-Raphaelite and the Arts and Crafts movements, helped to promote the Gothic revival in building, and infamously reviewed James Whistler so insultingly that he provoked a lawsuit. An excellent artist in his own right, in recent years his vivid watercolors and finely executed drawings have been shown in numerous exhibitions. He is equally recognized as a social critic for his efforts to benefit the working class and to rethink the structure of society on more just principles. He is often quoted as both a conservative and a progressive voice in the “Woman Question” debate, defending separate spheres while promoting women’s education. Having coined the term “pathetic fallacy,” Ruskin is of course also significant to the history of literary criticism and theory. Just as acute an observer of the natural world as of the aesthetic, Ruskin was an active member of the Geological Society. He wrote such impassioned eco-criticism that he is thirtieth of the top one hundred “green campaigners of all time” ( The Guardian , 28 November 2006). He is widely regarded as one of the greatest prose stylists in the 19th century; in particular, his autobiography Praeterita (1885–1889) is held to be among the most beautiful examples of Victorian life-writing. His other major works include Modern Painters (1843–1860), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), The King of the Golden River (1851), The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), Unto this Last (1860), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Queen of the Air (1869), Fors Clavigera (1871–1878;1880–1884), Fiction Fair and Foul (1880–1881), and The Bible of Amiens (1884).

In addition to the book-length general overviews mentioned here, the introductions to various editions and anthologies of Ruskin’s writing are also very helpful, and have the advantage of brevity. In particular, Birch 2009 is clear, engaging, and authoritative. Also brief is O’Gorman 1999 ; older but still excellent is Landow 1985 , available online as part of the exemplary Ruskin entry on the Victorian Web. The best single book to read on Ruskin is Rosenberg 1986 . Beautifully written, it is largely responsible for reviving critical interest in Ruskin in the second half of the 20th century. Both Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Nineteenth-Century Prose have devoted special issues to Ruskin.

Aronofsky Weltman, Sharon, ed. Special Issue on John Ruskin . Nineteenth-Century Prose 35.1 (Spring 2008).

Ten essays by both preeminent and emerging scholars, (Elizabeth Helsinger, Alison Milbank, David Hanson, Francis O’Gorman, Sara Atwood, Amelia Yeates, Miles Mitchard, Supritha Rajan, Jed Mayer, and George Levine, with an introduction by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman) on topics ranging from aesthetics and economics to modernity, memory, education, and science.

Birch, Dinah. “Introduction.” In Selected Writings . By John Ruskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Concise and illuminating, this is the best and most up-to-date brief introduction to Ruskin.

Landow, George. Ruskin . Past Masters Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Erudite and accessible, this brief introduction is reprinted online on the Victorian Web with many useful hyperlinks.

Various authors Special Issue: John Ruskin . Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18.2 (1994).

Valuable interdisciplinary essays by Elizabeth Helsinger, Dinah Birch, Judith Stoddart, and Jan Marsh, with and introduction by Michael Wheeler.

O’Gorman, Francis. John Ruskin . Sutton Pocket Biography. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999.

Lively and informative short introduction to Ruskin’s life and work for the neophyte.

Rosenberg, John D. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius . New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Essential reading for anyone interested in Ruskin, this brilliant book is widely credited with reviving critical interest in Ruskin in the 1960s. Originally published in 1963.

Sawyer, Paul. Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works . Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Enormously influential study of Ruskin as a writer, focusing readers on the artistry and significance of Ruskin’s language in understanding his ideas. Also available online .

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John Ruskin

The Later Years

by Tim Hilton

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• Published: Thursday, 1 Jun 2000

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Biography and Influence of John Ruskin, Writer and Philosopher

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The prolific writings of John Ruskin (born February 8, 1819) changed what people thought about industrialization and ultimately influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and the American Craftsman style in the US. Rebelling against Classical styles, Ruskin reawakened interest in heavy, elaborate Gothic architecture during the Victorian era. By criticizing the social ills resulting from the Industrial Revolution and disdaining anything machine-made, Ruskin's writings paved the way for a return to craftsmanship and all things natural. In the US, Ruskin's writings influenced architecture from coast to coast.

John Ruskin was born into a prosperous family in London, England, spending part of his childhood in the natural beauty of the Lake District region in northwest Britain. The contrast of urban and rural lifestyles and values informed his beliefs about Art, especially in painting and craftsmanship. Ruskin favored the natural, the hand-crafted, and the traditional. Like many British gentlemen, he was educated at Oxford, earning a MA degree in 1843 from Christ Church College. Ruskin traveled to France and Italy, where he sketched the romantic beauty of medieval architecture and sculpture. His essays published in Architectural Magazine in the 1930s (today published as The Poetry of Architecture , examine the composition of both cottage and villa architecture in England, France, Italy, and Switzerland. 

In 1849, Ruskin traveled to Venice, Italy and studied Venetian Gothic architecture and its influence by the Byzantine . The rise and fall of Christianity's spiritual forces as reflected through Venice's changing architectural styles impressed the enthusiastic and passionate writer. In 1851 Ruskin's observations were published in the three-volume series, The Stones of Venice , but it was his 1849 book The Seven Lamps of Architecture that Ruskin awakened an interest in medieval Gothic architecture throughout England and America. Victorian Gothic Revival styles flourished between 1840 and 1880.

By 1869, Ruskin was teaching Fine Arts at Oxford. One of his chief interests was the construction of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (view image). Ruskin worked with the support of his old friend, Sir Henry Acland, then Regius Professor of Medicine, to bring his vision of Gothic beauty to this building. The museum remains one of the finest examples of Victorian Gothic Revival (or Neo-Gothic ) style in Britain.

Themes in the writings of John Ruskin were highly influential to works of other Brits, namely designer William Morris and architect Philip Webb , both considered pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain. To Morris and Webb, the return to Medieval Gothic architecture also meant a return to the guild model of craftsmanship, a tenet of the Arts and Crafts movement, which inspired the Craftsman cottage style home in America.

It's said that the last decade of Ruskin's life was difficult at best. Perhaps it was dementia or some other mental breakdown that disabled his thoughts, but he eventually retreated to his beloved Lake District, where he died January 20, 1900.

Ruskin's Influence on Art and Architecture

He's been called a "weirdo" and "manic-depressive" by British architect Hilary French, and a "strange and unbalanced genius" by Professor Talbot Hamlin. Yet his influence on art and architecture stays with us even today. His workbook The Elements of Drawing remains a popular course of study. As one of the most important art critics of the Victorian era, Ruskin gained respectability by the Pre-Raphaelites, who rejected the classical approach to art and believed that paintings must be done from direct observation of nature. Through his writings, Ruskin promoted the Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner, rescuing Turner from obscurity.

John Ruskin was a writer, critic, scientist, poet, artist, environmentalist, and philosopher. He rebelled against formal, classical art and architecture. Instead, he ushered in modernity by being a champion of the asymmetrical, rough architecture of medieval Europe. His passionate writings not only heralded Gothic Revival styles in Britain and America but also paved the way for the Arts & Crafts Movement in Britain and the United States. Social critics like William Morris studied the writings of Ruskin and started a movement to oppose industrialization and reject the use of machine-made materials—in essence, rejecting the spoils of the Industrial Revolution. American furniture-maker Gustav Stickley (1858-1942) brought the Movement to America in his own monthly magazine, The Craftsman, and in building his Craftsman Farms in New Jersey. Stickley turned the Arts and Crafts Movement into the Craftsman style.  American architect Frank Lloyd Wright turned it into his own Prairie Style. Two California brothers, Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, turned it into the California Bungalow with Japanese overtones. The influence behind all of these American styles can be traced back to the writings of John Ruskin.

In the Words of John Ruskin

We have thus, altogether, three great branches of architectural virtue, and we require of any building,—

• That it act well, and do the things it was intended to do in the best way.
• That it speak well, and say the things it was intended to say in the best words.
• That it look well, and please us by its presence, whatever it has to do or say.

("The Virtues of Architecture," Stones of Venice, Volume I )

Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. ("The Lamp of Memory," The Seven Lamps of Architecture )

John Ruskin's books are in the public domain and, so, are often available for free online. Ruskin's works have been studied so often throughout the years that many of his writings are still available in print.

• The Seven Lamps of Architecture , 1849
• The Stones of Venice , 1851
• The Elements of Drawing, In Three Letters to Beginners , 1857
• Praeterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts, Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life , 1885
• The Poetry of Architecture, essays from Architectural Magazine, 1837-1838
• John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton, Yale University Press, 2000
• Architecture: A Crash Course by Hilary French, Watson-Guptill, 1998, p. 63.
• Architecture through the Ages by Talbot Hamlin, Putnam, Revised 1953, p. 586.
• Biography of William Morris, Leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement
• 5 Themes in the Works of John Ruskin
• An Introduction to Gothic Revival Architecture
• Biography of Philip Webb
• Exploring Stickley's Craftsman Farms
• The 10 Most Romantic, Picturesque Castles From Around the World
• Architecture Timeline - Western Influences on Building Design
• Craftsman Houses, Inspired by an English Movement
• American Victorian Architecture, Homes From 1840 to 1900
• A Look at Shingle Style Architecture
• American Bungalow Style Houses, 1905 - 1930
• House Style Guide to the American Home
• Characteristics of Romanesque Revival Architecture
• All About Gothic Architecture
• Otto Wagner in Vienna
• Introduction to Cast-Iron Architecture

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John Ruskin

John Ruskin was an English art critic, draughtsman, social thinker, watercolorist, and philanthropist. He was a leading figure in the Victorian period. He wrote on various topics and subjects that include literature, education, geology, myth, architecture, botany, ornithology, and political economy.

The way his subject matters were diverse; his literary forms and writing styles were diverse. He wrote poetry, essays, treatises, lectures, manuals, a traveling guide, a fairy tale, and letters. He was also a painter and made sketches and paintings of plants, rocks, landscapes, and architectural structures.

Ruskin elaborated style in his earlier works of art and then gradually changed to a more understandable language. He used everyday language to communicate his ideas effectively. He focuses on the connection between art, nature, and society. 

In the later part of the 19 th -century, Ruskin was a highly influential figure, and he remained an aspiring figure until the First World War. From WW I to the 1950s, there was a relative decline in his reputation. However, in the 1960s, his recognition and reputation started to climb the mountain with the publication of critical studies of his work. In the modern world, he has been recognized for his concerns and ideas, and his anticipated interest in craft, sustainability, and environmentalism.

A Short Biography of John Ruskin

John Ruskin was born on 8 th February 1819 in south London to John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin. His father was a wine merchant, and his mother was a daughter of a pub proprietor. Ruskin spent his early childhood in the Scottish countryside. At the age of 4, he shifted to South London’s Herne Hill. His early life in rural areas made him a lifelong lover of nature.

 He received his early education at home. He got influenced by the watercolor collection of his father, and Protestantism. He started writing poems at the age of seven. He would read and interpret the Bible on a daily basis. This interpretation made his basis for the criticism.

He traveled all across the world by his family wealth. Ruskin was highly inspired by the scenic landscape of the Lake District. He wrote the poem “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” after the beautiful scenery of the Lake District. He had been influenced by Romantic poets such as Byron, Wordsworth, and Scoot. He also collected a mineral’s dictionary. 

He also published articles (three in number) on geology when he was only 15 years old. He attended Oxford University and studied classics and mathematics. Though he was a brilliant student, he left university in 1844 after a period of illness with a double fourth degree.

 Ruskin was a great and talented artist. His drawing skills were as instinctual as his eating and drinking skills. From 1840 to 1870, he was a very prolific painter, and his watercolors imitated the expressive style of J.M.W. Turner.

In 1843, at the age of 24, Ruskin wrote his first volume of Modern Painter – Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters. This book was highly influential and hurled an attack on the artistic establishment. In this book, Ruskin criticized the painters of the 17 th century. He promoted the precise documentation of nature.

In 1849, Ruskin wrote The Seven Lamps of Architecture . The ideas Ruskin had in the book is expanded in The Stones of Venice published in 1851. The book is a three-volume treatise on the art and architecture of Venice.

In 1862, he published Unto This Last. The book is considered as one of the best books of Ruskin even though it is not concerned with the criticism of art. The book is about the issues of capitalist economics. He also talks about the dehumanization resulting from the industrial revolution.

In 1848, Ruskin married a beautiful lady Euphemia Gray (nickname: Effie). She was a family friend and ten years younger than him. The marriage was not a happy one because of many reasons. In 1852, Effie fell in love with John Everett Millais, for whom she has modeled a painting. In 1954, the marriage between Effie and Ruskin was annulled after a lot of public scandals.

In 1865, Ruskin fell in love with a young pupil Rosa La Touche. However, the two could not marry. In 1875, Rosa died at the age of 27. The death of Rosa made Ruskin turn to spiritualism. It was during this time that Ruskin started showing his first signs of severe psychological distress. He was haunted by mental illness throughout his life.

In 1869, Ruskin was appointed at Oxford University as Slade Professor of Fine Arts. In 1871, he established his own school, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford University; however, in 1883, he resumed his Professorship. In the following year, he resigned again.

During that time, his health started deteriorating. He put his political thoughts into practice and started writing for the monthly magazine Fors Clavigera. In 1975- 1977, he wrote a traveling guide Morning in Florence. From 1880 to 1885, he wrote another travel guide, The Bible of Amiens .

In 1871, Ruskin purchased a house Brantwood, in Lake District. The house is now standing as a museum for the works of Ruskin. He lived for the rest of his life in Brentwood.  He suffered from depression in the late 1870s that continued till his death. Ruskin also underwent critical episodes, which could be a bipolar disorder. On 8 th January 1900, he died of influenza at the age of 80.

John Ruskin’s Writing Style

In the history of English Prose, Ruskin occupies a prominent position. Certainly, Ruskin is the utmost mastery of the style of English prose. In the Victorian era, grand style and grand language in prose and poetry were widely used. However, Ruskin contributed to the English prose without employing the grand style or the antithesis and similes of Lylyan and the balance and parallelism of Johnson.

Ruskin employed a flexible language and bent it according to his use. He used simple language in the eulogy, picture description, argument, personal appeal, and persuasion. Even though he had carefully read Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Hooker, Ruskin sustained the uniqueness and individuality in his style. Now, he is regarded as the master of the English language.

The earlier prose writing of Ruskin is ornamental and gorgeous . He employed outstanding descriptive passages. These passages demonstrate his tendency and feeling for the beauty of color and form and use of superlatives. Ruskin started his literary career as art-critic. In literary expressions, he could not avoid employing picturesque.

For example, in his book Modern Painter s, he employed a rhetorical and poetic touch. He used phrases such as “flashing fullness of dazzling light,” “waves drink, and the clouds breathe,” and “bounding and burning in the intensity of Joy” for ornamentation. Ruskin illustrates his mastery of motion, sound, and color of words. He illustrates his richness and power in the illustration of scenic beauty.

However, in the later prose works, particularly his works on socio-economic writings, he employed simpler sentences. He did not overload his works ornaments. Ruskin gives clear arguments in his later works to convince the readers. He expressed his standpoint in clear-cut and plain style. In his later works, there is no obscurity or vagueness. Hu puts facts forwards in a more convincing and dynamic manner. In his book Work , Ruskin writes:

“You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in the position in which providence has placed him. That is modern Christianity.”                                                                 

The principle style Ruskin employed in his works in rhythm . The rhythmic quality of Ruskin is admired by Saintsbury by saying that his works often cross the boundary between meter and rhythm, thus creating willful lawlessness and want of self-criticism. Therefore, his work turns out to be blank verse. The rhythmic flow of his sentences is influenced by the Bible. Rhythm is created in his works because of his choice of words and imagery. For example, in his book Unto This Last, Ruskin writes:

 “Ye sheep without a shepherd, it is not the posture that has been shut from you, but the presence.”

The length of sentences is another distinguishing quality of Ruskin’s style. Since the seventeenth century, Ruskin is the first writer who wrote sentences of almost twenty or thirty lines, even of one page. His sentences contain 200, 250, or 280 words with a single pause. Each sentence contains more than 50 commas, semi-colons, and colon. Despite the long sentences, his sentences have a symphonious flow, blended images, and harmony of tone. The words are simple and complete and the passage is read without any difficulty in comprehension. His book Work is filled with examples of long sentences.

In his works, Ruskin shows biases towards the scriptural allusions and phrases and the language of the Bible. His style and diction are made through this biasedness. His works are saturated with the phrases from the Bible, and he employed them with any effort. The reading and interpreting the Bible in his childhood influenced his writing style greatly. He had remembered verses of the Bible and relates those verses with everyday life. 

For example, the notion of rich and poor for Ruskin was not separable from the Dives and Lazarus.  The plentiful use of references and phrases from the Bible made him a morally earnest writer and contributed to his prophetic passion. When addressing the common people, who deeply believe in the Bible, the references from the Bible proved to be very useful. For example, in his lecture on Work, Ruskin employed almost sixty references from the Bible and text of scriptures.

Ruskin employed an extraordinary descriptive power. His style of description is not equal to any English prose writer. The employment of such a description is only possible for the landscape artist, a painter. His description of landscape and nature is the result of his poetic imagination.

The writing style of Ruskin also contains sarcasm and irony. Though Ruskin employed keen irony, it is not as harsh as swifts’. He employed sweet, gentle, and tolerant irony like Addison and Chaucer. In his lecture on the book Work , Ruskin shows his discontent with wealthy British citizens to carry their well-dressed children to church. He asserts that these people should also have sympathy for the poor little children on the streets. Ruskin employed the irony of the Christian Justice to say that it is blind and mute; if it is not blind, it is dilapidated; at day time, she does not perform her job but does it at night.

Satire is another powerful element in prose writing. He time and again criticizes London in his works by calling it a cricket ground of Lord without turf, clothless billiard table, and it has deep pockets without a pit at the bottom. He also satirizes by saying that the foul city of London is pouring out the poison from every pore.

The writing style of Ruskin is, therefore, incisive, effective, and imaginative. According to Harrison, it is a type of wit, clearness, wit, versatility, passion, and eloquence. His writing is simple but sublime, grand, and complex. His writing is sarcastic, persuasive, expository, and ironic. Sometimes, his tone is prophetic; at the same time, it is like a professor of economics. His writing has rhythmic and sonorous qualities. His writing style is the combination of passion and faith, and it also reconciles faithfulness with simplicity.

Shortcomings of Ruskin’s Style

Though there are certain shortcomings of Ruskin’s style, it is self-revelatory, like Montaigne and Charles Lamb. Unlike Cowper and Charles Lamb, it lacks laughter, good humor, and agreeable nonsense. His style is didactic. He writes as if he is delivering a sermon. His construction of style is quite often complicated. His works become ambiguous and boring by employing a lot of references from the Bible.

Ruskin’s thoughts do not appear to be in steady order, which makes his writing style inherently diffused. To achieve perfect style, Dr. Johnson suggested readers and writers spend their days and nights studying the style of Addison. Though Ruskin has studied Addison quite in detail, his works do not seem to hold his style. The style of Ruskin is the bow of Ulysses, which cannot be bent by anyone.

Ruskin’s style has been commented by Harrison by saying that indeed his style is not perfect; it is a model style that can be studied, followed, and cultivated.  Regardless of many defects, Ruskin is regarded as the master of English prose style, of simplicity, and of faultless ease. By adding harmony, animation, coloring, and resources of rich imagination, Ruskin extended the range of English Prose.

Works Of John Ruskin