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The grave of John James Ruskin, father of John Ruskin, in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon Childhood and education Ruskin as a young child, painted by James Northcote. Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station.
- Overview
- Early life and influences
- Art criticism
John Ruskin (born February 8, 1819, London, England—died January 20, 1900, Coniston, Lancashire) English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.
Ruskin was born into the commercial classes of the prosperous and powerful Britain of the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. His father, John James Ruskin, was a Scots wine merchant who had moved to London and made a fortune in the sherry trade. John Ruskin, an only child, was largely educated at home, where he was given a taste for art by his father’s collecting of contemporary watercolours and a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible by his piously Protestant mother.
This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical Revival and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting laid the foundations of Ruskin’s later views. In his formative years, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Sell Cotman were at the peak of their careers. At the same time religious writers and preachers such as Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas Arnold, and John Henry Newman were establishing the spiritual and ethical preoccupations that would characterize the reign of Queen Victoria. Ruskin’s family background in the world of business was significant, too: it not only provided the means for his extensive travels to see paintings, buildings, and landscapes in Britain and continental Europe but also gave him an understanding of the newly rich, middle-class audience for which his books would be written.
Ruskin discovered the work of Turner through the illustrations to an edition of Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy given him by a business partner of his father in 1833. By the mid-1830s he was publishing short pieces in both prose and verse in magazines, and in 1836 he was provoked into drafting a reply (unpublished) to an attack on Turner’s painting by the art critic of Blackwood’s Magazine. After five years at the University of Oxford, during which he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill health from sitting for an honours degree, Ruskin returned, in 1842, to his abandoned project of defending and explaining the late work of Turner.
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In 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters, a book that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him for the next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the depiction of Nature in Turner’s landscape paintings. Neoclassical critics had attacked the later work of Turner, with its proto-Impressionist concern for effects of light and atmosphere, for mimetic inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent the “general truth” that had been an essential criterion of painting in the age of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Drawing on his serious amateur interests in geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his business to demonstrate in detail that Turner’s work was everywhere based on a profound knowledge of the local and particular truths of natural form. One after another, Turner’s “truth of tone,” “truth of colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,” “truth of water,” and “truth of vegetation” were minutely considered, in a laborious project that would not be completed until the appearance of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860.
This shift of concern from general to particular conceptions of truth was a key feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin’s first major achievement was thus to bring the assumptions of Romanticism to the practice of art criticism. By 1843 avant-garde painters had been working in this new spirit for several decades, but criticism and public understanding had lagged behind. More decisively than any previous writer, Ruskin brought 19th-century English painting and 19th-century English art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As he did so, he alerted readers to the fact that they had, in Turner, one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art alive and working among them in contemporary London, and, in the broader school of English landscape painting, a major modern art movement.
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Ruskin did this in a prose style peculiarly well adapted to the discussion of the visual arts in an era when there was limited reproductive illustration and no easy access to well-stocked public art galleries. In these circumstances the critic was obliged to create in words an effective sensory and emotional substitute for visual experience. Working in the tradition of the Romantic poetic prose of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and the blank verse of William Wordsworth, Ruskin vividly evoked the effect on the human eye and sensibility both of Turner’s paintings and of the actual landscapes that Turner and other artists had sought to represent.
In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and professional classes of the English-speaking world to the possibility of enjoying and collecting art. Since most of them had been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, Ruskin knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, he defined painting as “a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” What that language expressed, in Romantic landscape painting, was a Wordsworthian sense of a divine presence in Nature: a morally instructive natural theology in which God spoke through physical “types.” Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart…having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”
An only child, Ruskin was born in 1819 in south London to affluent parents, John James Ruskin, a Scottish wine merchant, and Margaret Ruskin, the daughter of a pub proprietor. The young Ruskin spent his summers in the Scottish countryside and when he was four, the family moved to south London's Herne Hill, a rural area at the time.
- British
- February 8, 1819
- Brunswick Square, London
- January 20, 1900
En 1841, Ruskin conoció en una escuela infantil de Wrington a la que será más tarde su esposa, Effie Gray, de 12 años de edad. Según K. Clark, en Ruskin Today, [3] Ruskin tenía «... una noción infantil de la feminidad, mitad gatito, mitad reina de las hadas, y cuando la confrontaba con la realidad retrocedía horrorizado».
John Ruskin (1819-1900) Sígueme en Google Noticias. Uno de los mayores críticos de arte de la era victoriana, el escritor inglés John Ruskin tuvo un gran impacto en la evaluación de arte del siglo XIX. Sus puntos de vista personales sobre la pintura y la escultura (y también sobre la arquitectura) tuvieron una gran influencia en el gusto ...
29 de mar. de 2013 · In 1848 the 29-year-old Ruskin – two volumes of the influential Modern Painters to his name and at work on The Seven Lamps of Architecture – married Euphemia Gray, the beautiful 19-year-old...
Hijo de Margaret Cox y John James Ruskin, un rico comerciante que estimuló su pasión por el arte, la literatura y los viajes. Cursó estudios en la Universidad de Oxford.
