|
2. John Ruskin (1819-1900)
 Life
John Ruskin, artist, poet, and the pre-eminent art
critic of his time, was born in 1819 into a well-to-do wine merchant family
in London. In his childhood and youth, he went on many tours in England and
the Continent, first with his father but then independently, and studied art
and architecture. Therefore, he had developed great enthusiasm for
medievalism from a very early age.
After graduation from Oxford at 24, Ruskin published
the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) in defense of
J. M. W.
Turner, an English landscape painter. Since then, he became well known as an
art critic. The five volumes of the whole work of Modern Painters
(1843-1860) appeared over a period of 18 years.
On April 10th, 1848, Ruskin married Effie Chalmers
Gray, and the next year he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
after which he and Effie set out for Venice. In 1850 he published The
King of the Golden River, which he had written for Effie nine years
before, and a volume of poetry, and in the following year, during which
Turner died and Ruskin made the acquaintance of the
Pre-Raphaelites and
published the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). The
final two volumes appeared in 1853, the summer of which saw John Millais
(1829-1896), a painter of Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin and Effie together in
Scotland, where the artist painted Ruskin’s portrait. The next year his wife
left him and had their marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation,
after which she later married Millais. During this difficult year, Ruskin
defended the Pre-Raphaelites, became close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and
taught at the Working Men’s College. The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and The Stones of Venice both deal with Gothic Architecture. All
these works were warmly accepted by the public and critical world. In 1869,
he was elected the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.
Ruskin and Rossetti
 After
1854, inspired by the social injustice, Ruskin turned much of his energy to
social criticism. Both his series of articles later collected in Unto
This Last (1862) and Munera Pulveris (1872) received so strong
opposition of the bourgeoisie that they were broken off when first published
in magazines. He also wrote social criticism appeared in Fors Clavigera.
Letters to the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britain (1871-1884). In
these works, Ruskin showed his great sympathy to the working classes and
blamed the capitalist industry for their misery. However, his solution was
to go back to the handicraft industry of medieval feudalism.
In his last years, Ruskin suffered a lot from mental
illness. In 1880 he resigned his Oxford Professorship, suffering further
attacks of madness in 1881 and 1882; but after his recovery he was
re-elected to the Slade Professorship in 1883 and delivered the lectures
later published as The Art of England (1884). In 1885 he began
Praeterita, his autobiography, which appeared intermittently in parts
until 1889, but he became increasingly ill and lived in seclusion. He died
on 20 January 1900 at Brantwood, his home near Coniston Water.
|
