John ruskin

John Ruskin (London, February 8, 1819 - Brantwood, Cumbria, January 20, 1900) was a British writer, art critic, sociologist, artist and social reformer, one of the great masters of English prose. He greatly influenced Mahatma Gandhi, who advocated Christian socialism.

Early Years

John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy wine merchant, which greatly influenced his ability to travel to different parts of Europe during his youth. He grew up in South London and was one of the founders of the formation of the Ruskin, Telford and Domecq company. With his work, he greatly influenced the tastes of Victorian intellectuals. Among his personal friends were the family of Robert Baden-Powell, whom he taught and watched grow up.

In 1837 he entered Oxford, a university to which he bequeathed a collection of engravings, drawings and photographs; he also founded a drawing school for the students. At present, part of his works are preserved among drawings of nature and others from different Gothic cathedrals.

Seven Lamps of Architecture

He won a major prize for his poem "Salsette and Elephanta" in 1839 and graduated in 1842. In 1843 appeared the first volume of Modern Painters, by a Graduate of Oxford, in which Ruskin he maintained the superiority of modern landscape painters over the old masters. He discovered the famous William Turner, to whom he dedicated a famous essay. Successive volumes expanded the subject until turning the work into a comprehensive treatise on the principles that should constitute the foundations of art, which helped to consolidate his prestige as a master aesthete and art critic. His theory of architecture is merely moral, a philosophy that is in search of truth. While he applied similar considerations to another domain of art in his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), where he pointed out a kind of laws or bases that every artist must obey when creating, and list seven:

Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Ruskin views these issues as extra-architectural.

Each chapter contains abundant technical principles and insightful observations on classical and medieval art. Examples taken from masterpieces of French and Italian architecture. Also his Stones of Venice (1851-1853), where he analyzes the religious, moral, economic and political importance of domestic architecture.

Aesthetics

Ruskin's work stands out for the excellence of its style, rebelling against the aesthetic numbness and the pernicious social effects of the Industrial Revolution, he formulated the theory that art, essentially spiritual, reached its zenith in the Gothic of the late the Middle Ages, a style of religious inspiration and moral ardor:

Architecture is not only building technique, it is also art, it is the art that disposes and adorns the buildings erected by the human being for whatever use, so that their vision contributes to their mental health, power and pleasure...

John Ruskin saw in nature, in flowers and in their leaves, forms that could be brought to architecture, and thus man could establish in the architectural enclosure, a sensation of calmness, serenity and beauty.

His idea of beauty has a double nature: the abstract beauty of things, without any consideration other than the form, and that which can be recognized after a process of elaboration and patient work by the artist on the work (hence its great admiration for Fra Angelico).

Link with painters of his time

He became friends with painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Everett Millais; the latter, he married Ruskin's wife after they separated.

Interest in the beauty of girls

He is also known for his fascination with the beauty of girls. In 1841, Ruskin met his later wife, 12-year-old Effie Gray, at a Wrington nursery school. According to K. Clark, in Ruskin Today, Ruskin had "...a childish notion of femininity, half-kitten, half-fairy-queen, and when he confronted her with reality he recoiled in horror.".

The Pre-Raphaelites

He pointed to Rafael as the author of the sin of painting some parts with more detail than others. Ruskin's students were called Pre-Raphaelites. He himself pointed to this group as the artistic hope of England.

Economist and social reformer

As an economist and social reformer, he declared himself a frank and inflexible enemy of what he considered selfish and lethal in the doctrines of the so-called Manchester school, and it was in this sphere that his series of letters addressed to the workers and laborers of the Kingdom were concentrated. Kingdom, who influenced social reformers for three generations. He obtained the first Slade Chair of Art at the University of Oxford in 1869, a position he held until 1879. He bequeathed to this University an important collection of engravings, drawings and photographs, in addition to donating a large sum of money for the creation of a center of drawing teaching. Ruskin illustrated numerous of his works with drawings by his own hand.

Last years and death

From 1885 until his death in 1900, he lived in retirement in Brantwood (in the northwest of England), after he became incapacitated in 1889 due to worsening episodes of insanity that he had been suffering from since 1870. Among his works on economic matters, social and ethical aspects include Sesame and Lilies (1865), Ethics of the Dust (1866) and Crown of Wild Olive (1866).

Works

Ruskin in 1882

The spectrum of topics covered by Ruskin was very broad. He wrote more than 250 works that began in art history and criticism, but ended in subjects as varied as science, geology, literary criticism, ornithology, the effects of pollution on the environment, or mythology. After his death, his works were collected in an extensive collection, carried out by his friends Edward Cook and Alexander Wedderburn in 1912. Only such an extensive index is capable of reflecting the breadth and interconnectedness of all the thoughts of him

• Modern paints (1843-1860). His first work, conceived in defense of Turner's landscape.
• The seven lamps of architecture (1849). His fundamental work, where he develops his aesthetic ideas.
• The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). Work written after his stay in Venice, also exponent of his aesthetic ideas, as well as his vision of the Gothic.
• Lectures on architecture and painting (1853)
• Political Economy of Art (1857)
• Two roads (1859)
• Unto this last (1860-1962). Work that influenced M. Gandhi
• Sesame and lilies (1865)
• The morals of dust (1866)
• The Wild Olive Crown (1866)
• Fors Clavigera (1871-1887). Letters to the English workers
• Mornings in Florence (1874)
• The Bible of Amiens (1880-1885)
• Praeterita (1885-1889). Unfinished biography. Translated into Spanish with the title of 'Praeterita, memoirs of a Victorian booth' (Ed.Cuadernos de Langre, 2018)