CUMBRIA: Brantwood Info

Date:		22nd. September 2015
Blog Status:		Complete (not visited)
County:		CUMBRIA
Location:		Brantwood (Coniston Home of John Ruskin)
Type:		Historical Building, Gardens, Scenic Area
Sub-Type:		Lake
Viewed by:		Unseen. Researched information for reference.
Car Park:		?
Scene Rating:		Not yet seen. Not yet rated.

Please note: all data and opinions presented on this site are offered in good faith, but they are advisory only and are utilised at the risk of the user. The authors can accept no blame or liability for any loss or accident or other negative effect resulting from errors, omissions or data that has changed over time.

Original photographs found on this website are Copyright © Richard Baskerville 2015, All Rights Reserved. If small versions of other photographs are found here, they act only as links to larger versions on their originating websites. Such images may be copyrighted by their original owners. Please see the linked websites for copyright details.]

Brantwood: Introduction

Brantwood is a large and rambling country house with a 250 acre wooded and gardened estate built on the Eastern shore of Coniston Water (on the opposite side to Coniston town.) The prefix Brant- is an old Norse word meaning "steep" - echoing the estate location on steep, wooded slope which has wide vistas across the lake and mountains.

The original house was built on the site of a celebrated viewpoint at the end of the 18th century as a relatively modest mansion with some 6-8 rooms. It was extended in 1833 and a number of times from the early 1870s, resulting in the large and rather carbunkular exterior of the dwelling that exists today.

Brantwood is most famous for its association with the celebrated Victorian thinker, John Ruskin, who bought the house from the Dean of Durham Cathedral (whom he knew from his time in Oxford) in 1971 - although the house had a strong pedigree that included several high-profile residents involved in cultural pursuits, such as William James Linton (who was an engraver, poet, artist, book illustrator and social reformer with opinions that Ruskin would probably have approved.)

Ruskin did not come to Brantwood in the following year, by which time he'd already started a programme of repairs, extensions and peripheral construction that continued on and off for many years. This included adding a turret and a new lodge for his valet's family. He started to extend and improve the gardens at the same time.

Ruskin also filled the house with artworks by Gainsborough, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites - as well as collections of minerals, pottery and sea-shells which were not seen as incongruous with fine-art at the time.

A large new dining room with wide views over the lake and mountains through 7 lancet windows was added on in 1878 and new storey in 1890, to provide additional rooms for his cousin Joan Agnew, her artist husband Arthur Severn and their family. The dining room was the focus of pilgrimages by many of Ruskin's intellectually powerful friends, although the the coterie declined as Ruskin subsided into bouts of into mental illness .

The Severns inherited the house on Ruskin's death, although in line with his principles as a social reformer and educationalist socialistic inclinations, his will specified that the house should be open to the public for 30 days a year to see his art collection.

The Severns did not honour this intention and many paintings were auctioned before the house and remaining contents were saved for the nation by John Howard Whitehouse and the Birmingham Ruskin Society, who bought the house and - in 1951 - established the Brantwood Trust in 1951 to care for the property.

The trust continues to run the estate today. The house and four outbuildings are Grade II listed. Despite the earlier auctions the house is still said to retain the character and spirit of Ruskin's residency. There are still many fine paintings, most of Ruskin's fine furniture and the bulk of Ruskin’s personal treasures.

Brantwood: Information

Getting There and Parking

The Brantwood Trust's website is at www.brantwood.org.uk.
 
The house is accessed on minor roads down the eastern side of Coniston Water. Set your satnav to LA21 8AD. There's free parking on site.

Adult admission to the house and garden is £7.50 (or more with gift aid.) Children 16 and under can enter free. Student entry is £6.00. For the gardens only the rate is £5.20 for adults and £4.30 for students over 16.

The Attraction Today

Brantwood is open year round., although from the start of December to mid-March it's closed all day on Mondays and Tuesdays, and closes at 4pm on other days. Summer opening times are 10.30 to 5.00pm.

Visitors are free to wander through the interior, where room stewards are happy to answer questions. During the summer the trust's guides also offer regular guided walks through the grounds and offer insights into Ruskin’s thinking.

Visitors can also explore the estate on their own. There are also eight distinct gardens, which Ruskin used for different experiments in cultivation and drainage. The lower gardens have easy walking, while the upper gardens can get quite steep.

The 250 acres of the estate also boast wild fells, which support long and energetic hikes over open fell to viewpoints like Crag Head. There are wide panoramas over the lake.

More detailed descriptions of the eight gardens can be found on the Brantwood website although some of the gardens are more interesting for their scientific experimentation than for their beauty.

Curiously the Brantwood website does not include much in the way of a biography of John Ruskin or an assessment of his legacy, which is curious in a place that is so effectively dedicated to him. So we've added these below.

John Ruskin (Overview)

Ruskin's name crops up again and again in the culture of the Lake District - not least because he was one of the originators of the social ideas that led to the establishment of the National Trust, which now protects and conserves large tracts of the National Park.

Although Ruskin's name will be familiar to most visitors, his relevance to the 21st century is under question. Most people will know him for his odd Victorian prudery, as demonstrated in his marriage to Effie Gray - which lasted from 1848 to 1854 without ever being consummated and which was explored in the popular BBC drama series Desperate Romantics about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Ruskin's sexual eccentricity should not, however, dazzle us so much the flashing neons of paparazzi sensationalism that we are blinded to a true assessment of Ruskin's ideas - many of which have become as outdated as Victorian Gothic brickwork, but some of which have been influential enough to have made a positive impact on the moral and spiritual health of the nation.

Ruskin was in many ways a Renaissance man, whose knowledge and interest spread from the finer points of artistic and architectural aesthetics, through a broad spectrum of social and economic theory to gentlemanly sciences that - despite his acceptance of rather dogmatic Christianity - shows a familiarity and acceptance of Darwinism.  Commonly described as a "polymath," his wrtings cover geology, botany, ornithology, education, political economy, art, architecture, literature and mythology (from Ancient Greece to fairy stories.)

Although his main output was in his essays, treatises, lectures and travel guides, he was also a talented Romantic poet and watercolourist (although he seldom exhibited his visual art.) As with other broadly-talented Victorians like Beatrix Potter the line between Art and Science was not as clearly drawn as today and his sketches include studies of everything from rocks, plants and birds to buildings and ornamentation.

Yet, too often, his more advanced ideas in such areas as public education are betrayed by overriding Victorian bigotry, imperialism and racism.

Many of his theories were engendered by his horror of industrialised society and the sterility of mass production, which lent itself to rectilinear "classical" lines, rather than the sensuous curves and carving found in Gothic architecture - which Ruskin would have found closer to the forms found in nature.

Ruskin was, unashamedly, a Romantic. Yet too often his style of Romanticism is based, perhaps subconsciously, on assumptions about a kind of mythical Golden Age, when people were happy in their proximity to nature and machinery was hand-crafted in wood.

Even his euphoric celebrations of the paintings of Turner excluded works like "Rain, Steam and Speed" where the cloud-like plumes were created, not by the heavens, but by an industrial locomotive. Even his postive critique of The Fighting Temeraire seem to be focused more on the glorious history of the wooden hero of Trafalgar (which is half visible in the mist and on its way to be broken up) to the exclusion of the grubby paddle-steamer (whose smoke-stack is catching the bright orange rays of the sun and highlighting them with sparks - and which is actually "the future.")

Ruskin's ideas led into the creative cul-de-sac of the Arts and Crafts Movement, many of whose designs harked back to Tudor times. Yet they also had a positive side: it was Ruskin's perception of the need to preserve wild scenery and beautiful buildings from our communal history that fed into modern ideas of conservation and environmentalism. 

In terms of influence on Victorian thinking, Ruskin stands - if not head and shoulders then at least by a head - above the rest. His opinions on Victorian artists could guarantee fame or blight careers. Much of he slow acceptance of Constable's greatness can be traced to back to Ruskin's low estimation of him, because he did not fit into Ruskin's increasingly rigid aesthetic theories.

Ruskin was the spring of much of Victorian aesthetic and moral taste. In the days of his early fame he was able guide and channel the glittering runnels that fed from his spring, and - as they grew larger - scull Victorian passengers - with their neat suites and white parasols - to beautiful waterfalls and hidden picnic sites that hadn't been noticed before. But as this river of public perception was fed by other springs of Victorian public opinion (to which Ruskin himself contributed, the river's estuarine flow became so powerful that poor Ruskin's boat was carried along midstream, with no chance of of exploring the fascinating creeks and gleaming streams that were cutting through the distant muddy banks.

Part of Ruskin's "Victorian-ness" (he was born only a month before Victoria took the throne and died just a year before her) - and one of the reasons he is not much read today - can be seen in his prose style. Despite their aggressive pinning by of an embroidery-box full of commas, Ruskin's 6-line sentences often have the intelligibility of a basket of torn frocks - quite different to the concise and bulletted style we expect today.

This was not unusual in Victorian times. With the lack of passive forms of entertainment like radio and television, educated "gentlemen" (especially those from a "new money" background, who were keen to show their educational prowess) derived much of their pleasure from reading books and cultural magazines. And, if anything, they seem to have derived additional pleasure from being able to understand works in which the ideas (and expression of those ideas) were difficult to fathom - as if the challenges of content and sudoku were wrapped up in one weighty tome.

To his credit, Ruskin himself realised that stylistic flourishes and abstruse references to ancient sources were a block to understanding, and he simplified his writing as he became more focused on education. This may be one reason why his later works survived better than his earliest ones.

John Ruskin (Life)

Born in 1819, Ruskin's childhood was tugged by the contrasting influences of his ambitious parents. His father encouraged his son’s Romanticism with works by Walter Scott, while his Evangelical mother made sure that her son read and memorised much of the King James Bible.

Ruskin's father (John James Ruskin) was founding partner and business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq - a successful sherry and wine importer. The company was wound up in 1864 when John James Ruskin died, with the Domecq family buying the bodega that still forms part of Allied-Domecq today.

John James was unstinting in his use of his wealth to provide a rich and gentlemanly education for his son and they travelled widely. John went with his father to visit clients in country mansions, which were rich repositories of art and grand architecture. They had holidays in the Lake District and with relatives in Scotland, where there ample examples of the grand vistas that inspired the increasingly fashionable Wordsworth. And, from 1825 to 1835 (when John was still only 16,) the family visited France, Belgium. Germany, Milan, Venice, Genoa, Turin and the Alps. Many of these became John Ruskin's favorites and he revisted them often, to intensify his love of Nature and knowledge of art.

John's early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of accomplished poetry and drawings of landscapes and buildings that remarkable for a boy of his age. Many of these were influenced by J. M. W. Turner, whose work he'd first discovered as illustrations to book of poetry at the age of 13.

His father employed private tutors to encourage his artistic talent, but he first came to the attention of the public as a poet and essayist. His first publication was a poem about Skiddaw and Derwent Water (when he was 10,) although the breadth of his interests were demonstrated early on, with three short articles on geology for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History (when he was 15.)

Ruskin's first foray into the critique of aesthetics was published in Loudon's Architectural Magazine in 1837, when he was 18. Entitled The Poetry of Architecture it was a study of cottages and villas from the Wordsworthian perspective that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials - themes that were echoed in later writings. The article was written under a pseudonym.

Earlier that year he had taken up residence as "gentleman-commoner" in Oxford, to study Literae Humaniores (usually called "Greats" at Oxford or "Classics" elsewhere - since it features the History of Ancient Rome and Greece, Latin and Greek languages, and Greek philosophy) at Christ Church College. Not wishing her son to be tainted by the immoral exploits of spoiled young aristocrats, John's mother took up lodgings one street away, where his father joined her at weekends.

His mother hoped that a degree in "Greats" would pave the way for a career in the upper echelons of the Clergy, while his father saw it as a path to becoming poet laureate - but John found little inspiration at Oxford and suffered long bouts of illness, that were for a while feared to be consumption (tuberculosis,) which caused the death of John Keats at about the same time. The illness caused him to extend his time at Oxford to five years, although much of the last two years were spent abroad in Italy. This may perhaps explain the inauspicious "double fourth-class" degree he achieved in 1842.

Oxford did, however, allow him to meet interesting people from fields as wide as geology, theology and literature - including Wordsworth, whom he met in 1839.

While at Oxford John also won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry and wrote The King of the Golden River - a fairy story set in the Alps and featuring Christian sacrificial morality and charity that is still his most translated work, although it was not published until 1850. The story was penned because a 12 year-old called Effie Gray had asked him to write it and was the happy onset of what later became their disasterous marriage.

John's recuperation from his illness in Europe allowed him ample time to study Italian art, guided by the English portraitist George Richmond (to whom he was introduded by a friend of Keats - whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin.) This intensified appreciation of art caused him to write an impassioned defence of his hero, Turner, in response to adverse criticism directed at several of Turner's pictures in the Royal Academy. This was the second such defense. The first had been in response to an attack by a critic in Blackwood's Magazine when John was 17. (His father had sent the defense to 61-year-old Turner who, unsurprisingly, did not want to be defended by an unknown boy, and asked for the essay to remain unpublished - to which John James assented, although he also started to collect watercolours by Turner and Samuel Prout, through which both artists became occasional visitors to his home.)

The second defense of Turner developed into John Ruskin's publication Modern Painters (1834,) published anonymously by "A Graduate of Oxford" - which title Ruskin's 4th Class degree barely merited! John's controversial thesis was that modern landscape painters - especially Turner - were superior to the "Old Masters," because they exhibited "truth to nature" (including moral truth) rather than "pictorial convention." And he documented his thesis with lively descriptions of many examples of post-renaissance and contemporary art with which he already had considerable familiarity.

John asserted - in forceful terms - that the job of artists was to observe the reality of nature in the field and commit to canvas not only what they have observed of the scene, but also its inner meaning, as intuited by the artist's imagination. This he said should be done free of any rules of composition - placing the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation firmly above consideration of technique. Critical Reviews were mixed although John's obviously passionate appreciation and  ability to convey this in strong prose gained support from literary figures like Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell.

The fame this gave him was enough to persuade John Ruskin the redefinition of art criticism was the rôle he should pursue - although it was already clear that his discussion of art was much larger in its intent than the art itself. His critique involved theories of aesthetics, scientific observation and - particularly - the potential for an appreciation for nature and beauty as the basis for encouraging morality, which developed into more focused sociological viewpoints later in his life.

Modern Painters must also have hit a chord with Turner, since the two seem to have bonded thereafter, with the young Ruskin being named as Turner's executor in his will and given the task of cataloguing the close to 20,000 sketches that Turner bequesthed to the Nation.

Still with his parents, John (then aged 25) toured the continent again in 1844. The aim of visiting France was mainly to study the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino in the Louvre, but his scientific and Wordsworthian sides were also sated during time in Chamonix where he both absorbed the natural beauty and studied the geology. It was not until the next year that he shed the company of his parents, and travelled through France, to the cities of Lucca, Florence, Pisa and Venice in Italy, to study medieval art (notably Fra Angelico, Giotto and Tintoretto) and architecture.

His most memorable recollection of the time, however, was less the art than the alarming effects that both decay and unsympathetic restoration/modernisation were having on the beauty of Venice. It precipitated the kind of conviction that many conservationists still debate today, that "restoration is tantamount to destruction," and that ancient buildings should be preserved for future generations in their existing state.

Modern Painters Volume II (1846) drew on his new familiarity with Renaissance and pre-Renaissance works and was more uniformly approved by critics (other than supporters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose "orthodoxy" Ruskin attacked!)

Ruskin's continuing concern with morality in art took a more Christian turn in assertions that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together and that all great artists must take the perception of beauty and communicate it to the rest of Mankind through the imaginitive use of semiology.

During 1847 Ruskin was reintroduced to Effie Gray, for whom he had written his (as yet unpublished) fairy story 7 years earlier. Effie was now 19 years old and, encouraged by his father, the couple married shortly before her 20th birthday.

The antipation of an extended honeymoon in Europe was curtailed by the first rumblings of nationalistic revolutions inside the Austrian Empire (which stretched from Romania to Northern Italy - including Venice - at that time) and which it was feared might spread. So they resticted themselves to Normandy, where Ruskin spent time researching the Gothic architecture for his new book The Seven Lamps of Architecture (published in 1849) which contained 14 plates that he etched himself and was the first book he published under his own name.

Although it focused on the Gothic revival, the thrust of the work was on seven core moral categories ("lamps") that Ruskin considered vital to all art and architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. It was a clear demonstration of Ruskin's ideas that art and architecture were to be treasured - and conserved - for the moral qualities that were embedded in them, rather than the art itself.

This was not an entirely new idea, although the coherence of the theory went far beyond what had gone before. One of the pioneers of the Gothic Revival - the architect Augustus Pugin - had argued the case more than 10 years earlier (in his 1836 book Contrasts,) writing that the beauty of Gothic architecture lies in its origin in a purer, more spiritual society. Ruskin was no doubt aware of Pugin's works, but since Pugin was (through his French father) Catholic, Ruskin carefully sculpted the ideas into a more Protestant mould!

Effie was also too ill to go to Switzerland in 1849 and it was perhaps indicative of John Ruskin's already fading devotion that he chose to visit the Alps without her, to gather new material for the next two volumes of Modern Painters. The main result of the tour, however, was social rather than aesthetic. John was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, which piqued his already sensitive social awareness and seeded the sociological ideas that became more important in his later life.

Such concern for people was, however, derived more from Christian principles than any real ability to build relationships. Ruskin existed largely in a world of abstract thought - although thoughts about beauty and social fairness could surround themselves with such great passion as to appear humanised - and there was nowhere that this was more evident than in his marriage.

By November 1849 Effie's health had improved and the two of them visited Venice, where Effie socialised while Ruskin went off alone to make sketches of architectural studies that he feared might be damaged or looted by occupying Austrian troops - some of whom befriended Effie, with no objection from Ruskin! The notes and sketches made by Ruskin on this trip formed the basis of his 3 Volume Stones of Venice (published 1851–53) which drew on Venice's deterioration as symbol of the moral and spiritual decline in society. Ruskin argued that instead of using their art to revere Christianity, Renaissance artists had arrogantly celebrated human sensuousness to exalt their own egos.

In a chapter about Gothic architecture, Ruskin took the same argument and applied it to the master-builders who constructed our great cathedrals. One of the values of Gothic masonry, he argued, was that it sprang the artisan’s joy in using his hands to express his own creativity. Sentences like...

The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, not machinery. We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense

...were later enshrined by members of the infant Labour Party as evidence of Ruskin's Socialism, which actually they aren't - although they did had a profound impact on progressive thinkers like the Non-Conformist Christian founders of the Working Men's College and Arts and Crafts Movement (genuine) socialist, William Morris.

Back in the field of aesthetics, there were increasing signs that some of Ruskin's theoretical ideas were became examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences and giving birth to unexpected monsters as they were applied in practice.

For example, early examples of the Gothic revival were being conceived according to modern business economics, which meant that they were constructed in a Gothic shape, but with modern materials like brick (and perhaps cast iron arches!) This was hardly an expression of artisan's using their hands to express their own creativity!

Starting in the 1840s (with Northern English churches that Ruskin probably never saw) this trend reached a peak in London - and even traditionalist Oxford - between about 1860 and the early 1900s, when heavy-looking neo-Gothic buildings like St. Pancras Station, The Natural History Museum, Keble College and Westminster Cathedral made mockery of the kind of medieval aspirations that had driven the construction of Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral by master masons. Even the Gothic Revival building with which Ruskin is most associated - the Oxford Natural History Museum (constructed a decade before Keble College, which it now faces) - uses lightly-embellished stone only for the exterior, with interior arches maximising the passage of light with slim cast-iron. And that concession in no way stopped the cost of the building being a worry throughout the construction phase...

There were also signs that Ruskin was becoming so locked into his own dogma that he was starting to push his evaluation of contemporary artists so that they fitted the theories he had already constructed, rather than judging his spontaneous appreciation of their work with a truly open mind.  

Ruskin's support of the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt) is a particular mystery - although perhaps he gave it more through a belief in the moral improvement that could result from the practice of art, more than the belief that any one of them could become another Turner or Giotto.

The Brotherhood had been formed in the year of Ruskin's marriage with a number of commitments that seem to have been derived from Ruskin's principles. The agreed to "paint from nature only" and, initially at least, were dedicated to painting serious (and particularly Christian) subjects (under the influence of the Oxford Movement.)
There was also a trend (developed still further in the case of later Pre-Raphaelites like Byrne-Jones) towards the portrayal of scenes from mythology or aetherialised medievalism, which were not explicitly sanctioned by Ruskin, although he was known (along with a number of increasingly escapist Victorians) to be interested in both.

Ruskin's first contact was with the "brother" who was most obsessed by technique, John Everett Millais, to whom he inexplicably provided patronage. Perhaps Ruskin found his interest in accurate scientific illustration dominating as he travelled with Millais to Scotland in 1853, where Millais painted an almost perfectly observed study of gneiss rock (to which he later added Ruskin's portrait!)

Yet the Pre-Raphaelite technique of painting nature with almost photographic detail was so far removed from the free-flowing pre-Impressionism of Turner's skies and seascapes that it was hard to believe they could exist in the same universe, let alone win the support of the same critic!

One explanation may be that Ruskin's own ideas did not form a completely coherent whole - with some later ideas antithetical to earlier ideas. In the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin seemed to support a kind of Wordsworthian believe in Great Nature as a moral guide that can be detected by the artist's Imagination. All Romantic here. But already by Modern Painters II Ruskin seemed to be demanding a more explicitly Christian belief - into which even Turner's more socially-aware works like "The Slave Ship" don't really fit. Romanticism does not really work with Christian Orthodoxy, which does not really work with pagan Mythology, which does not really work with scientific observation - and yet all of them can actually provide valuable subjects for Art.

Yet, despite these contradictions, the wide acceptance of Ruskin's theories by polite Victorian society was a pressure that aspiring artists could no longer ignore, such that Ruskin's writings was becoming a whale-bone corset into which the creative community was increasingly - and often unsuccessfully - trying to squeeze.

The feature we most admire in pre-Raphaelite paintings today is the ability to render the simple humanity of real people, which was at odds with Ruskin's insistance on heavy morality - although the two were ocasionally merged successfully, as in Holman Hunt's refreshing Light Of the World. 

Rossetti's post-1860 (let's say "post-Raphaelite") women look tired, tousled, yet irrepressibly sensual, as if they have just fallen out of bed (which frequently they had.) This was a far cry from the stilted and moribund figures of paintings like the Girlhood Of Mary Virgin - which erred heavily on the side of "a moral subject" at the almost total expense of "painting from nature."

Ruskin admired the Pre-Raphaelite ability to draw the reality of people - although his writings continued to focus more on the symbolism. But he became increasingly uneasy with the sexuality of Rossetti's models, until the almost life size topless "Venus Verticordia" (who is holding an apple remininscent of the fallen Eve) brought reality and perceived immortality far too close and caused a breach between the two. 

Yet the honesty with which Rossetti drew his women - which had a huge impact of later art movements like the "art for arts sake" Aesthetic Movement - remained encumbered by medieval Gothic symbolism,  as if the artist could not throw off Ruskin's influence entirely.

Ruskin's inability to come to terms with the reality of the feamle form had already lost him his bride, 14 years earlier. Despite several years of marriage, his relationship with Effie had never been consummated - leading her to acute mental anxiety and open conflict with her husband and his smothering parents. She "went home to mother" in Scotland, where Millais borrowed her as a model for his 1852 painting The Order Of Release and then fell in love with her.

The Order Of Release was well received by other critics for breaking away from the highly detailed Pre-Raphaelite backgrounds that had made Millais' 1851 Ophelia the work-intensive flagship of the movement. The painting features a strangely stoical mother - babe in arms -  with her wounded and kilted rebel Scottish husband burying his face in her shawl, as she presents a release paper to a redcoat guard.  The background is just brown shadow. There is no element of Nature in it at all. The focus is all on the humanity of the people (although the addition of a faithful dog compromises the intensity of the moment and is the unfortunate precursor of a popularist trend which led to the infamous "Bubbles", which was worthy of a biscuit tin, but eventually ended up advertising generations of Pears soap.)

The release paper had a strangely predictive import, and within two years Effie had departed Ruskin to be with Millais and (in April 1854) filed for divorce on the grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency." While Ruskin disputed the slur on his manhood, he did not contest the annulment. Given that he had made excuses to be alone with his research for some considerable period, it may even have come as a relief.

The scandal of the divorce proceedings precipitated a good deal of salacious speculation which continue to be resurrected to ths day - although with the more robust sexuality of our present era, they have inevitably become imbued with accusations of paedophilia (that the "Effie" Ruskin wanted was the pre-pubescent 12-year old for whom he wrote the fairy story, not the 19-year old woman he married.)

The true reason for Ruskin's inability to have a physical relationship with his wife will probably never be known, although it's generally accepted that Ruskin's familiarity with the female form as oil on canvas or polished marble made him create an abstractive and idealised view of women as something pure and inviolable, that no woman could actually match. This was, actually, not unusual in the polite asexual mythology of Victorian gentlefolk - although in most marriages the illusion somehow managed to co-exist with the principle of laying back and thinking of England.

Women who caused scandals by falling out of their ivory Victorian tower and having extra-martital affairs were viciously ostracised for their betrayal - particularly in the narrower and jingoistic socities in the cantonments in colonies like British India where the mem-sahib was expected to be a paragon of virtue akin to the Queen-Emperor herself. And even in the novels of Charles Dickens, where fallen women like Bill Sikes abused girlfirend Nancy have a tangible realism and pathos to them, "good" women seem to have an unnatural pre-teen purity about them - making them appear as perpetually virginal dolls devoid of personality.

Ruskin married a myth of biblical virtue and found himself in bed with a warm and sexual partner with hair and monthly flow. It was not what he expected...

Even after the break with Millais, Ruskin continued giving financial support to other Pre-Raphaelites - despite the tensions created by his father's disapproval. Ruskin's reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy continued to render his influence on artistic taste and fashion unchallenged and he continued to develop his theories of Art in Modern Painters. Volumes III and IV were published in 1856 - Volume III asserted that only those with a developed sense of morality and spirituality are able to connect with the essence of beauty and sublimate it into Art, while Volume IV looked from the reverse perepective and returned to the more Wordsworthian idea of how natural beauty (the Alps in this case) can embue receptive people with its moral and spiritual influence.

The 5th and final volume of Modern painters was published in 1860 - but by this time Ruskin's interests were already swinging away from Art as an essentially intuitive talent that few possessed, that towards the encouragement of Art as a creative exercise for all.

Ruskin’s had first become involvement in education, in the mid-1850s, when he and Rossetti taught drawing classes at the Christian Socialists' Working Men's College. Although Ruskin was not a Socialist, he did support the idea that learning artistic skills could help people in all strata of society - including women - achieve a kind of creative fulfilment that would make them happier by encouraging their self-awareness and making them more effective in the life-rôles they had been dealt. His techniques of instruction were published in 1857 as Elements of Drawing.

He also became involved with education at a progressive school for girls in Cheshire, a teacher-training college for teachers and through lecture tours in Universities and Exhibitions across the country. His first lecture (on architecture and painting) had been given in Edinburgh in 1853, with his 1857 Manchester lectures being collated and published as The Political Economy of Art and, later, A Joy For Ever.

His thesis was that a person's true wealth is defined by the richness of their virtue and that Art is measure of a Nation's health, although his arguments went beyond this and expanded the concept of personal morality into one of social responsibility, with consumers responsible for seeking only beneficial products, so as to stimulate a truly ethical economy. Lecture tours in 1858 and 1859 echoed these economic themes and caused increasing tension with his father, whose business had continued to underwrite the philosophies that now attacked them - although they still toured Germany and Switzerland together in 1859.

This period was a traumatic one for John Ruskin. His interest in geology (and age of the Earth that this implied,) together Biblical archeology had finally undermined his belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This also caused him to doubt the validity of much of his own writing, since large parts of publications like Modern Painters II, had based their definitions of morality and adherence to the Scriptures.

His mental state was also affected by the start of a confusing attraction to a girl called Rose La Touche, which threatened to reprise the disasterous path that his life had take with Effie Gray (who's doll-like look she somewhat featured.)

The story started in 1858 when Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by the Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche  asked Ruskin to teach her 3 children drawing and painting. One of the daughters, Rose, was ten at the time (but seems to have developed some sort of crush on Ruskin (aged nearly 39) that led to years of correspondenceto and from Rose's "Mr Crumpet" until Ruskin also realised that he was in love with her. Rose's age at the time Ruskin's feelings became apparent is a matter of debate, although it is believed that it was about 4 years after the first meeting, when she was about 14.

The La Touche family were dedicated Protestants who became concerned about Ruskin's waning faith - as well as the unnatural level of correspondence that was passing between him and their daughter - and tried to discourage the interaction and stop the two from meeting.  Ruskin’s love for Rose was often a source of great joy, although his attraction to one so young was also a source of depression and anxiety that lingered in the background for many years.

His friend, the Scottish philosopher and eductor Thomas Carlyle encouraged Ruskin to fill the void of faith with the more practical morality of social reform. Using a more direct and understandable style of writing, Ruskin increasingly to victimised the aggressive competitiveness and selfishness of industrial capitalism as inherently damaging to the kind of communal philanthropy that can lead to an overall social improvement. 

Starting with the principles that the richest country is the one which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings and that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, has always the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others Ruskin progressively broadened his scope from the dignity of labour to the nature of such things as the Social Contract and the ideal community.

In four essays, later gathered into the volume Unto This Last, Ruskin rejected division of labour (in which, for example, one person would rough-cut stone, another would roughly shape it, another add detail and another give it a final polish) as undercutting a craftsman's pride in his work by never giving him creative ownership. Ruskin also drew an Ancient Greek philosophy and used the metaphor of a family to show the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of what he considered to be "true" economics. For Ruskin, economies and societies should be underwritten by social justice to create a "social economy" which included charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.

The essays were originally to be serialised in the new Cornhill Magazine in 1860 - but the reaction from its mostly conservative subscribers was so hostile that the editor - novelist William Makepeace Thackeray - was forced to abandon the series the nervous publisher. The Press was also hostile, as was Ruskin senior. Only Ruskin's more radical friends like Carlyle were supportive.

But Ruskin's new focus on Social Philiosophy proved to have a more lasting effect than his aesthetics (which an article on the worldsocialism website briskly dismisses as his "nonsensical religious analysis of art") although, almost certainly, not in the way he intended! Mohandas Gandhi (Gandiji) later paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, who was a large nail in the coffin of the British Empire. Later founders of the Labour Party also took the bits of Ruskin they liked and quietly ignored the rest.

Ruskin was by no means a Socialist. He did not even consider himself to be a Liberal or Non-Conformist. In fact he argued against the idea of trying to level the class system. Along with other people - like Charles Dickens, who had a much more intimate awareness of the brutalising effect of poverty - he saw bruising inequality as a moral problem which had arisen from institutionalised greed and unchallenged exploitation.

Although his literal belief in the Bible had deserted him, his Christian principles remained - and these clearly stated that the richer in society had a clear duty to improve the conditions of the poor. It was from this platform that he sought to alleviate the worst social inequalities: not by overthrowing capitalism but by mollifying it with a more co-operative and unified structure based on benevolence. As with many of his social ideas, the concept of the benefits of organic unity had actually been coined earlier, in relation to morality and Art - but it was now adapted to be more explicit to the political economy.  His thoughts were summarised a Law of Help which stated: Government and cooperation are in all things and eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, the laws of death.

Concepts of disciplined co-operation and the need for honesty bewteen traders, customers, employers and employees were further developed in Ruskin’s 1862-63 Essays in Political Economy (serialised in Fraser's Magazine but also cut short by subscriber hostility) and in letters published in 1867 as Time and Tide.

Ruskin Senior died in 1864, and 45 year-old John inherited a large fortune, which gave him the means to develop his philanthropic urges into practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first acts was to support Octavia Hill (once one of his art pupils, and - 29 years later - one of the three founders of the National Trust) in buying Marylebone properties for her philanthropic housing scheme.

Yet, despite his new personal wealth, he continued with a busy schedule of lectures as venues as disparate as Cambridge, Camberwell, the Royal Military Academy, Bradford  and Manchester. Later condensed into his works Sesame and Lilies (1865) and The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) Ruskin's lectures continued to explore themes like taste and morality, social and cultural value, education, and ideal conduct. Other lectures, on the role of women, was advanced in asserting women's right to an education, but still placed them firmly in the conventional Victorian ivory-tower role of housekeepers responsible for providing the family with the kind of human compassion that balances the social order dominated by men. It was published in the book Of Queens' Gardens, which came to be one of Ruskin’s most popular (although perhaps as presents from men to their wives and daughters) before the rise of feminism clearly spot-lighted its Victorian sexism.

The focus on women's place was perhaps prompted by his ongoing attraction to Rose La Touche, which was still very much in his mind. Rose was 16 at this time, but still a long way the time she could make her own decisions.

Ruskin eventually proposed to her on or near her eighteenth birthday in 1867, but - whatever her own feelings - her family's distrust of Ruskin's Faith seem to have prevailed and Rose asked him to wait for her answer until she was 21, when she reached her own age of majority. The family's discouragement also seems to have continued after this time, since a chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact in the following years.

In 1869 Ruskin was made the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University and in his first speech repeated his theme that The Art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues and that its effect on each man should be visible and moving. Two years later Ruskin also founded his own Oxford art school: The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art - endowed with £5000 of his own money.

[The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art should not be confused with Ruskin College - originally Ruskin Hall - which was not founded until 1899 and not by Ruskin. It was actually founded by two Americans who had studied at Oxford and who - on the basis of Ruskin's principles of social responsibility - wanted to provide educational opportunities for working-class men who were denied an Oxford education by their income. Ruskin College became a symbol of workers' education that became a model for labour colleges around the world and was visited by Gandhiji in 1931.]

John Ruskin's lectures were revolutionary for the time in being liberally illustrated with visual aids like slides of drawings and watercolours. His lectures also encompassed a highly eclectic and often practical view of myth, ornithology, geology, natural science and literature - as well as Art (which included discussions about wood and metal engraving and the relationship between Art, science and sculpture,) as a practical application of his stricture that The teaching of Art is the teaching of all things. Most of these were also published for a wider audience and were often controversial, although Ruskin was little deterred by adverse reaction within the University.

His place in Oxford didn't deter Ruskin from his program of social improvement - including wild schemes like involving undergraduates in road-mending scheme to teach them the virtues of wholesome labour and public service. (One of the diggers was Oscar Wilde, whose training may later have proved prophetic when he was sentenced to hard labour...)

1871 was an eventful year for Ruskin. Besides founding his School of Drawing and Fine Art he also started his "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" (published as Fors Clavigera (1871–84,) founded his St George's Fund and bought a house in the Lake District. It was also the year his mother died and marked another year of waiting for Rose La Touche to take him as her husband. The Fors Clavigera letters have been described more rcently as a modern-day blog, albeit a highly literary, complex and allusive one and dealt with a wide variety of subjects (as well as social issues) in a variety of styles.

Among many other things, the blog was used to document the development of Ruskin's  attempt at creating a utopian society. Initially founded as the St George’s Fund, it later became the St George’s Company before finally settling to the name of The Guild Of St George in 1878 (under which name it still exists today.) Ruskin committed £7000 to acquire land,  a wide collection of books and art, and other beautiful objects for the project. It was supposedly a "communitarian" venture, although in practice it was very hierarchical - with Ruskin as Master and a circle of dedicated "Companions" (whose first loyalty was nearly always to Ruskin) at the head. "Companions" were expected to donate a tenth of their annual income to the Guild, in emulation of the medieval system of Church tithes...

One aim of the Guild was almost amish in its desire to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed traditionally (without much mechanical assistance.)  The first attempt at farming was made in Totley (today just 2 km from the border of the Peak District National Park, south of Sheffield,) although it met with only moderate success.

Despite this, Ruskin's reputation continued to attract donations of land and capital from wealthy Companions, with the Guild soon owning land and property in Worcestershire, Gwynedd, North Yorkshire and Hertfordshire. At the same time Ruskin's involvement became increasingly fanciful and impractical as he focused on low priorities like different grades of "Companion", codes of practice, styles of dress and the design of the Guild’s own coins!

Besides traditional styles of farming, the Guild also tried to revive traditional rural handicrafts. It established St. George’s Mill on the Isle of Man and encouraged efforts to produce hand made textiles in the Lake District.

Another project (related to the other two only in Ruskinian Theory) was the 1875 foundation of the St. George’s Museum in Walkley, Sheffield. The large collection of art works, minerals, geological specimens and medieval manuscripts that Ruskin acquired for it was aimed at bringing steel-workers the sights and experiences otherwise confined to the wealthy...

Ruskin also wished to establish St George’s Schools, but this never happened and in practice the Guild never really expanded beyond a small scale. The rather boyish Arthurian concepts on which Ruskin built the "Guild" also gave it an aura of escapist folly rather than that of a serious attempt at a new style of social economy. As Ruskin's largest practical venture - it betrays the fact that Ruskin was never really able to turn his ideas into practical form in the way that others - like William Morris - were able to do.

Ruskin also continued his travels and research into Art and Architecture in Italy. In 1874, he ventured further than ever before and visited Sicily. This didn't lead to any new aesthetic or philosophical work, although Ruskin did eventually combine his love and travel, Art and education to satisfy the emerging demand for Travel and Gallery Guides.

The potential for escapism offered by travel and the St George's Fund was perhaps a welcome distraction from the emotional turmoil that Ruskin's feelings for Rose La Touche kept bubbling in the backgrounds. Rose's 21st birthday came and went without a positive answer from her - in fact a final answer did not come from her until she finally released him from his proposal in 1872. This was not the termination of their relationship, however. They continued with occasional meetings until February 1875.

Tragically, Rose died three months later in a Dublin nursing home of an unknown ailment that had been building up over the years. She was 27. Variously described by authors as madness, anorexia, a broken heart, religious mania or hysteria, the underlying cause remains the subject of speculation. But we do know that her death plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness - involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions - that had been afflicting him on rare occasions since 1871. Inadequately supported by his Christian beliefs, Ruskin turned to the desparate Victorian fad of Spiritualism and was alternately comforted and disturbed by what he believed was his ability to communicate with the departed Rose...

Back in Oxford, his by now semi-regular Fors Clavigera letter of July 1877 launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler. The attack was particularly aimed at Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and accused the artist of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".

Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, who was too ill to defend his position, although he was represented in court by several artists who'd benefitted from his sponsorship - noteably Burne-Jones. Whistler won the case, but it was a pyrrhic victory of titanic proportions: he was awarded damages of just one farthing, with costs being split.

James Abbott McNeil Whistler was an American, although he had spent most of his life in Europe. From the age of 8 he grew up in St. Petersburg (1842-1849) where his father was an advisor to the Moscow–St. Petersburg railway. Returning to the USA after his father's death, he was educated at West Point - from which he was dismissed, although the army still gave him work as a draftsman. After 6 years, at the age of 25, he went to Paris and lived in poverty for 4 years while he studied art in the more austere and tonally sombre neo-classical style of Ingres, who had struggled against the fashionable ornate and saturated Romantic style of Delacroix.

In 1859 he'd moved to London, which he hoped would provide a better living than the competitive art scene in Paris. By the time of the trial, Whistler had lived in England for nineteen years, where he'd established a good reputation, despite being well outside the pre-dominantly Ruskinian idea of taste.

The trial was not so much about the painting (by no means Whistler's best) as Ruskin's right to dictate what was acceptible or not acceptible in Art in such dictatorial terms.

Whistler's most recent style was the complete antithesis to Ruskin's Romantic, heavily symbolic and overtly moral theories that had guided popular Victorian taste into realistic renderings of nature and historical narrative. Whistler believed that art should be admired for its beauty alone (art for art’s sake) and that artists had the right to control their own artistic philosophy. The paintings that decanted Ruskin's vitriol - the Nocturnes series  - were set in real (albeit dark and moody) twilight settings around the Thames, with figures that were barely more than blurred shadows emerging from the fog. In many ways, they anticipated one of the forms of Impressionism

Ruskin was famous in the USA and Europe as well as in Britain, so the battle between his theories and the emerging Aesthetic Movement (exemplified by Whistler) were well covered in their newspapers and magazines, as well as those in England. Whistler's victory still cost him his home and its contents, and he subsequently moved to Venice to escape further debt and make a living from etchings. He never returned to painting in the style of Nocturnes which is a loss to our artistic heritage that can be laid squarely at the door of the aging Ruskin's entrenched dogmatism. There was some realisation of this at the time. Ruskin’s supporters paid his costs by public subscription, but the trial caused a large stain on Ruskin's reputation from which he never really recovered

By 1879 the pressures of Oxford had again affected Ruskin's health and he resigned his post (possibly as a result of University authorities' refusal to expand his Drawing School.) He took up the post in 1883, but was again forced by ill health to finally resign it the following year, aged 64.

The break from regular demands in the University gave Ruskin more space for writings unrelated to Art and Education. In 1880, Ruskin returned to some literature that had been his - and his father's - favourites since his childhood. Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) discussed the value of Walter Scott, Wordsworth and Byron. In many ways Byron seems an odd choice for his admiring words, although he had mentioned him appreciatively in many works, including Modern Painters. Ruskin was obviously aware of the salacious side of Byron (his parents had carefully chosen what he was allowed to read in Don Juan when he was young) but somehow this doesn't seem to have ruled him out from greatness on the grounds that all Art should be moral.

A closer look at Ruskin's perception of Byron show that his opinions - as with many other instances of his evaluation of literature and Art - are idiosyncratic and highly selective - perhaps guided by what Ruskin thinks should be there, rather than what actually is. In an 1857 Essay on a Turner picture of Childe Harold Turner "joins in the injustice many have done to Byron in dwelling on the passionate rather than the reflective and analytic elements of his intellect." In Modern Painters III there is the equally cold-blooded "The true Seer always feels as intensely as anyone else, but he does not much describe his feelings." Would he say the same for Wordsworth's "Prelude"?

Another interesting 1880's Essay brings Ruskin back to science. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century (1884) describes the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns and is seen by some Greens as early environmentalism - although it was more probably another aspect of Ruskin's hatred of Industrial Capitalism.

Ruskin’s writings showed an increasing despair and moral dissatisfaction with the modern world that saw him reaching to the past - to chivalry and Art - to escape.

Ruskin was aging and the late 1880s were the threshold of an inexorable decline. Having collapsed on on a tour of France and Italy in 1888, it became too risky for him to travel abroad. And the new dominance of the Aesthetic Movement and Impressionism that had been signalled in the Whistler trial distanced Ruskin from the world of contemporary Art, where his opinions were increasingly seen as irrelevant. His scientific opinions also became unpredictable and he turned on Darwinian theory with unexpected violence.

His energies became more directed towards his house on Coniston Water, which he's bought in 1871 - although he was initially an infrequent visitor. His restless experimentalism were directed into building an ice-house, rearranging the gardens, extending the harbour, exercising in his rowing boat, building a reservoid and waterfall, and adding seats from which he could draw and study the local plants and wildlife.

As he grew weaker he suffered longer bouts of mental affliction from his hereditary CADASIL sydrome, which is chracterised by migraines, mini-strokes, mood disorders and - eventually - dementia from as early as 35 - 55 years of age. His cousin Joanna

He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes.[152] As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness (thought in retrospect to have been CADASIL syndrome), he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin’s mother) and she inherited his estate. "Joanna’s Care" was the eloquent final chapter of his memoir which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.[153] Joan Severn, together with Ruskin’s secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend, Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his Will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume Library Edition of Ruskin’s Works, the last volume of which, an index, attempts to articulate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin’s thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin’s public and personal reputation.[154]

John Ruskin (Ideas and Legacy)

In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.


He 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 improved 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.

Legacy International Ruskin’s influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as, "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his words into Russian.[160] Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French.[161] Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by Unto This Last and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it Sarvodaya, "The Advancement of All".[citation needed] In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.[162][163] Cannery operation in the Ruskin Cooperative, 1896 A number of Utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony which existed in Dickson County, Tennessee from 1894 to 1899. Ruskin’s work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Chinese, Welsh and even Esperanto and Gikuyu. Art, architecture and literature Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated Ruskin’s ideas in their work.[164] Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin’s influence.[165] The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer knew Ruskin's work well.[166] Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver, John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist, Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent, H. W. Nevinson. No true disciple of mine will ever be a “Ruskinian"! – he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its Creator. “ ” [167] Craft and conservation William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin’s legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on preservation of open spaces and conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends, Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley, to help found the National Trust.[168] Society and education Pioneers of town planning, such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in their writings. The same is true for the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.[169] Edward Carpenter’s community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy’s colony at Purleigh, briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin’s ideas and Tolstoy’s. The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin’s educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin’s ideas.[170] Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard. Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil, George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement. Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, used Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinized" in order to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.[171] Politics and economics Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist, Frederic Harrison.[172] Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the later civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest members acknowledged his significance than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible.[173] More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.[174] Ruskin in the 21st-century Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, also Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round.[175] Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today. John Ruskin Street in Walworth, London Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name. The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. John Ruskin College, South Croydon, is named after him. The Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today. The Ruskin Art Club is the oldest ladies club in Los Angeles. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh. Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of the short-lived Ruskin College is named for John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled, "Head, Heart And Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.[176] Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook, the Co-operative Holidays Association and the Youth Hostels Association);[177] the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre.[178] The sociologist and media theorist, David Gauntlett, argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be traced to today's online community at YouTube and throughout Web 2.0.[179] Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin’s understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a whole new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.[180] Notable modern-day Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians, Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd,[181] Frank Field[182] and Tony Benn.[183] In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century.[184] Jonathan Glancey at The Guardian and Andrew Hill at the Financial Times have both written about Ruskin,[185] as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg.[186] Theory and criticism Upper: Steel-plate engraving of Ruskin as a young man, c. 1845, print made c. 1895. Middle: Ruskin in middle-age, as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford (1869–1879). From 1879 book. Bottom: John Ruskin in old age by Frederick Hollyer. 1894 print. Ruskin wrote over 250 works which started from art criticism and history, but expanded to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn.[187] The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, causes certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken".[188] Clive Wilmer has written, further, that "the anthologizing of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts" is "something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start".[189] Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.

Art and design criticism Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. As such, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in Modern Painters I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing."[190] By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world.[191] For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, This could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.[citation needed] Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified."[192] Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century, to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts which he had helped to inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism. For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure."[193] Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as the Crystal Palace, which he criticised.[194] Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument. Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task. Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works attacking Laissez-faire capitalism which he considered to be at the root of it. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. John Ruskin's Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, 1853. Pen and ink and wash with Chinese ink on paper, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.[195] Clark neatly summarises the key features of Ruskin's writing on art and architecture: Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanizing as economic man. Even the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognized for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions. These facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt. The greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct of life. Beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function.' This fulfillment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and cooperating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society. Good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important. Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny.[196]

Historic preservation Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. Ruskin was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin wrote: Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.[197] This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."[198] For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."[199]

Social theory Ruskin attacked orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy For Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential essays, Unto This Last. Nay, but I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be "chosen." The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum. “ ” Modern Painters V (1860) [200] At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See section, "Stones of Venice", above.) He argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product. In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and ‘gentleness and justice’; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame.[201] Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.[202]

Enjoy!


- dikb