John Ruskin

8 February 1819-20 January 1900. Influential art critic.

Private Life

Ruskin was the only child of John James Ruskin and Margaret Cox. Due to his father who tutored him, he came in contact with art at a very young age. Together with his family, he travelled to several European countries, such as the Switzerland, Italy and France and therefore came in contact with foreign cultures very early as well.

Between 1837 and 1842, Ruskin studied at Christ Church College, Oxford and during this time, in 1840, he married Adèle Domecq. This marriage caused him a mental breakdown, which is why he travelled to Italy where he came in touch with paintings and architecture. In 1848, Ruskin married a second time [what happened to his first wife? divorce? murder?], Euphemia “Effie” Chalmers Gray, but after six years she annulled the unhappy marriage in 1856. Throughout the years, Ruskin suffered from mental breakdowns, one after Rose La Touche, an ill girl he knew since she was young and who he proposed to several times, died in 1875. He started using séances to speak to her again. The last ten years before his death were characterised by mental decline. Ruskin spent his time at his estate, Brantwood, on Lake Coniston. After catching the flu, he died 20 January 1900 in Brantwood, Lancashire.

Career

1843, shortly after he had graduated from Oxford, Ruskin published his first art book: Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to the Ancient Masters. In total, five volumes were published by 1860, all initially under the pseudonym “a Graduate of Oxford”. Within the next few years, he visited France and Italy and got inspired by several authors and architecture. Resulting from that, he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1846, the first book he published under his name, and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), which consists of three volumes. 1853, Ruskin held lectures on architecture and painting in Edinburgh. During the next years, he published volume 3 and 5 of Modern Painters and supported the painter William Turner and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1866, he held the lecture on The Relation of National Ethics to National Arts at Cambridge University. Between 1869 and 1879, and 1883 and 1884, he became Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. During his last years which he spent in Brantwood, he worked on the unreliable autobiography Praeterita, which he never finished. John Ruskin is regarded as a representative of interdisciplinary thinking, as his knowledge covered the fields of politics, botany, geology, poetry, museology, architecture, art and history.

Works Cited

“John Ruskin.” arthistoricum. https://www.arthistoricum.net/themen/portale/gkg/quellen/ruskin. Accessed 14 December 2023.
„John Ruskin.“ Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/person/gnd/118604279. Accessed 14 December 2023.
“Ruskin, John.” Dictionary of Art Historians. https://arthistorians.info/art-historian/ruskinj/. Accessed 14 December 2023.