Who was John Ruskin? | RuskinSocietyNA

Who Was John Ruskin?

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the most prominent and influential art critic of the nineteenth century as well as one of the period’s most articulate social critics. He was by turns a gifted artist, amateur geologist, botanist, etymologist, mythologist, and early environmentalist. The first volume of Modern Painters (1843), a defense of J.M.W. Turner, established him as a powerful new voice in the art world. Modern Painters would eventually stretch to five volumes (1843-1860), evolving from a treatise on art to a complex and multilayered study of art and society.

Ruskin’s work greatly influenced thinking about art, architecture, and social reform during his lifetime and after. In England, he was an active and well-known public figure—instructor at the Working Men’s College in London, Oxford professor, public lecturer, prolific author, and visionary reformer. As the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Ruskin’s lectures often had to be given twice in order to accommodate the considerable crowds who attended them. Ruskin’s ideas influenced public debate; he came to be seen as one of Victorian England’s sages. His ideas found purchase in America as well. Although Ruskin never visited the United States, he had a number of American friends, foremost among them Charles Eliot Norton, first Professor of the History of Art at Harvard and an influential figure in American culture. Ruskin’s work was read and admired by many American artists as well, including Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, and other members of the “American Pre-Raphaelites.” Writing in The New Path in 1863, Moore declared that “Ruskin has been sent to open our eyes and loose the seals of darkness. He has shown us the truth and we thank him.” The prominent American art journal, The Crayon, was influenced by Ruskin’s teaching. Ruskin’s Guild of St George, the self-sufficient, utopian community he established in 1871 in Britain, inspired experimental (though short-lived) Ruskin “colonies” in Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee.