John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the most influential art critic of the nineteenth century and spent the second half of his life arguing that the way a society makes things is the same question as how it treats people. He was an only child of a wealthy sherry importer, educated at home and at Oxford, and published the first volume of Modern Painters at twenty-four defending Turner against critics who found him formless. The Stones of Venice followed, and its chapter on the nature of Gothic - which argues that the roughness of medieval carving is evidence of free workmen, and the perfection of machine work evidence of enslaved ones - was reprinted as a pamphlet by William Morris and is the founding text of the Arts and Crafts movement. He championed the Pre-Raphaelites when they were being savaged. Then he turned to political economy: Unto This Last in 1860 attacked the whole apparatus of laissez-faire and was so unpopular that the magazine serialising it stopped; Gandhi read it in South Africa, translated it into Gujarati, and said it changed his life. He funded and directed Octavia Hill's first housing purchase, endowed a drawing school, founded the Guild of St George, and gave away most of his fortune. His marriage was annulled for non-consummation, he suffered severe mental breakdowns from 1878, and he wrote almost nothing in his last decade. He was tried for libel by Whistler in 1878 over a review calling one painting a pot of paint flung in the public face; Whistler won a farthing in damages and was bankrupted by the costs. Ruskin resigned his Oxford chair over it. His house at Brantwood on Coniston Water is open to visitors. Proust translated two of his books into French without at first knowing much English.

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