John Ruskin

British critic and writer John Ruskin (1819-1900) is known for his “word-painting,” or critiques and projections of art, artists, and architecture of the past, present, and future. Ruskin forecast more than the works of future painters; Ruskin developed as an independent philosopher of society, the classes, beauty, and religion.

Ruskin is known for his five-volume Modern Painters, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Pre-Raphaelitism, the three-volume The Stones of Venice, the “economic books” Unto this Last, Munera Pulveris, and The Crown of Wild Olive, as well as his letters, pamphlets, and lectures.

Ruskin was a professor of fine arts at Oxford from 1870 to 1879. Ruskin was also the founder of a drawing school and a museum, and he wrote travel guides about Venice and Florence.

Ruskin’s lifetime and the public’s perception of him was molded by Ruskin’s ever-changing philosophies, ideas about art and religion, society, and the economy.

Of Ruskin, it has been said: “John Ruskin was the most influential art critic to write in England between the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792 and the publications of Clive Bell and others around 1914. It is not, in fact, too much to say that his is the most important body of art criticism in the English language.”

"John Ruskin." Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 4: Victorian Writers, 1832-1890. Gale Research, 1991.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004.