In the vibrant and often contentious art scene of Victorian England, Artist John Ruskin emerged as a pivotal figure, not as a painter, but as a profoundly influential art critic. His perspectives, articulated with fervent conviction, ignited debates in courtrooms and shaped public opinion, all stemming from the revolutionary ideas he presented about art and its purpose.
Ruskin’s seminal work, Modern Painters, began its multi-volume journey in 1843, a project that would engross him for the next seventeen years and solidify his status as a leading voice in art criticism. Initially, Ruskin’s primary objective was to defend the artistic “truth” he perceived in the landscape paintings of J.M.W. Turner. Turner’s later works, with their proto-Impressionist exploration of light and atmosphere, were under attack from Neoclassical critics. These critics, adhering to the artistic standards established in the era of Sir Joshua Reynolds, deemed Turner’s art mimetic inaccuracies, failing to capture the “general truth” they considered essential.
Challenging this established view, artist John Ruskin, leveraging his deep knowledge of geology, botany, and meteorology, embarked on a meticulous project. He aimed to demonstrate, detail by detail, that Turner’s art was rooted in a profound understanding of the specific and localized truths of the natural world. Through detailed analyses, Ruskin systematically championed Turner’s “truth of tone,” “truth of colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,” “truth of water,” and “truth of vegetation.” This exhaustive examination unfolded across the five volumes of Modern Painters, finally concluding in 1860.
This emphasis on particular truth over generalized conceptions marked a significant shift aligned with Romantic thought. Ruskin’s initial triumph lay in applying the core principles of Romanticism to the realm of art criticism. By 1843, avant-garde painters were already embracing this Romantic spirit, but art criticism and public appreciation lagged. Artist John Ruskin, more effectively than any critic before him, bridged this gap, bringing 19th-century English painting and art criticism into harmonious alignment. In doing so, he illuminated for his readers the presence of a towering figure in their midst: Turner, whom Ruskin proclaimed one of the greatest painters in Western art history, actively working in contemporary London. Furthermore, he championed the broader school of English landscape painting as a major modern art movement.
Ruskin’s success was also due to his distinctive prose style, uniquely suited to discussing visual arts in an age with limited image reproduction and restricted access to art galleries. In this context, the art critic’s role was to conjure a vivid sensory and emotional experience through words, acting as a substitute for direct visual engagement. Drawing inspiration from Romantic poetic prose masters like Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, and more directly influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s descriptive writing, the rhetorical power of the Bible, and the blank verse of William Wordsworth, Ruskin masterfully evoked the impact of Turner’s paintings, and the landscapes they represented, on the viewer’s eye and sensibility.
Through his writing, artist John Ruskin opened the doors of art appreciation to the burgeoning wealthy commercial and professional classes of the English-speaking world. Aware of their puritanical religious backgrounds, which might breed suspicion towards art emphasizing sensual pleasure, Ruskin strategically defined painting. He presented it not merely as aesthetic indulgence, but as “a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” In the context of Romantic landscape painting, this language conveyed a Wordsworthian sense of the divine presence within Nature – a natural theology imbued with moral instruction, where God communicated through tangible “types” found in the physical world. Ruskin urged young painters to approach nature with “singleness of heart…having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” emphasizing the spiritual significance of the natural world.
Expanding on these ideas in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), artist John Ruskin explicitly differentiated this rigorous ethical, or Theoretic, conception of art from the Aesthetic, undidactic, or “art-for-art’s-sake” philosophy that would emerge as its primary rival in the latter half of the 19th century. Despite maintaining friendships with proponents of Aestheticism, Ruskin remained a steadfast advocate for a morally and socially engaged understanding of art throughout his life, leaving an indelible mark on Victorian art criticism and beyond.
