John Ruskin(1819–1900)

John Ruskin was born at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, in Bloomsbury on the eighth of February 1819, only child of John James Ruskin, a Scottish-born sherry-importing partner in the firm of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq, and Margaret Cock of Croydon. He was raised at Herne Hill in south London from his fourth year in the strict Evangelical-Calvinist household his mother kept, was tutored at home by his mother in the Bible (he was taken through the whole of the King James Version twice by his sixth year), travelled annually through his boyhood on the family sherry-business tours of Switzerland and northern Italy, and was schooled at private day-schools and at the Reverend Thomas Dale's boarding-school at Camberwell. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1837, took the BA in 1842, the MA in 1843, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1839.

He published the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843 in his twenty-fourth year, the long critical defence of the contemporary English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner against the academic-conventional dismissal that Blackwood's Magazine had given Turner's late work. The volume took the position that Turner's late watercolours and oils were the modern continuation of the great landscape tradition of Claude Lorrain and the Dutch seventeenth-century masters, and that the modern English landscape painting that Turner had developed should be judged on the terms its own ambition set. The book made Ruskin's name and Turner's critical reputation in the same eighteen months; the further four volumes of Modern Painters (1846, 1856, 1856, 1860) developed across seventeen years the central English-language theory of landscape painting of the nineteenth century.

He published The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 and the three-volume Stones of Venice in 1851 to 1853, the central English-language work on Gothic architecture, including the central single chapter The Nature of Gothic (Stones of Venice, Volume II, Chapter 6) on the social conditions of the medieval crafts. The Nature of Gothic was extracted and printed as a separate pamphlet by William Morris's Kelmscott Press in 1892 and distributed as a foundational tract of the Arts and Crafts movement and of the early English Labour movement; the chapter was the single most-cited piece of nineteenth-century English prose on the William Morris socialist platforms of the 1880s and 1890s. He was appointed first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford in October 1869 in his fifty-first year, held the chair to 1879 and again 1883 to 1885, gave the long Slade Lectures that constitute the central English-language university course in art history of the nineteenth century, and used the Slade Chair to commission the Oxford undergraduate Hinksey Road Project of 1874 (the practical-labour public-works project on which the undergraduates including Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee worked the road-building under Ruskin's direction as a demonstration of dignified manual labour).

His writing turned across the 1860s and 1870s from art to political economy. Unto This Last (originally serialised in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, published as a book in 1862) is the foundational English-language critique of the laissez-faire political economy of the Manchester school: he set out the central distinction between use-value and exchange-value, the principle of the just price, the doctrine of the social obligations of the rich, and the proposition that there is no wealth but life. Unto This Last was the single most-cited foundational text of the early British Labour movement. Mahatma Gandhi translated it into Gujarati in 1908 as the foundational economic text of his ashram and political programme; the Indian National Congress economic platform of the 1920s and 1930s was substantially built on Ruskin's principles via Gandhi.

He bought Brantwood, the small country house above Coniston Water in the Lake District, in 1872 and lived there for the last quarter-century of his life, founded the Guild of St George in 1871 as the institutional form of his political-economic argument (the Guild operated the St George's Farm and a small museum at Sheffield, and continues today as a charitable trust), wrote the long Fors Clavigera open letters to the working men of the country across 1871 to 1884 (ninety-six letters in eight volumes), and produced the autobiographical Praeterita in three volumes 1885 to 1889. He died at Brantwood on the twentieth of January 1900 in his eighty-first year and was buried in the parish churchyard at Coniston above the lake. The Ruskin name in modern English culture carries the weight of Modern Painters, Stones of Venice and Unto This Last.