John Ruskin

John Ruskin 8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900 was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany as well as political economy.

Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also portrayed detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural frameworks and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art submitted way in time to plainer language intentional tohis ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.

Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily upgrade since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.

Ruskin number one came to widespread attention with the number one volume of Modern Painters 1843, an extended essay in defence of the develope of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His shit increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last 1860, 1862 marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of professional Art at the University of Oxford, where he setting the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera 1871–1884. In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.

Middle life 1847–1869

During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of style friends. It was for her that Ruskin had solution The King of the Golden River. The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, one time the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin Ruskin's grandfather. Owing to this connective and other complications, Ruskin's parents did non attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.

Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father later addresses pointed nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill. Effie was too unwell to adopt the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.

The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.

Ruskin's coding interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first score to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture 1849. It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The denomination listed to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would dispense recurring themes in his future work. Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.

In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.

Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work The Stones of Venice 1851–53. developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, Stones represented Ruskin's concepts of contemporary England. It served as a warning approximately the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.

The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the moment volume of Stones. Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own pesonality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.