Early Life

Educated by his wealthy, evangelical parents, Ruskin was prepared for the ministry, and until 1836 he spent his mornings with his domineering mother, reading and memorizing the Bible. In 1833 the family went on the first of its many tours of Europe, and the boy ardently studied nature and painting. His stay (1836-40) at Oxford resulted in his winning the Newdigate Prize for poetry and in his determining not to enter the ministry. A breakdown of health in 1840 forced him to travel.

Critic and Reformer

The first volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters appeared in 1843. This work started as a defense of the painter J. M. W. Turner and developed into a treatise elaborating the principles that art is based on national and individual integrity and morality and also that art is a "universal language." He finished the five volumes in 1860. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) applied these same theories to architecture. In 1848, Ruskin married Euphemia Gray, a beautiful young woman with social ambitions; the union, which apparently was never consummated, was annulled in 1854, and Mrs. Ruskin subsequently married the painter John Everett Millais.

From his position as the foremost English art critic, Ruskin in 1851 defended the work of the Pre-Raphaelite group. His third great volume of criticism, The Stones of Venice (1851-53), maintained that the Gothic architecture of Venice reflected national and domestic virtue, while Venetian Renaissance architecture mirrored corruption. About 1857, Ruskin's art criticism became more broadly social and political. He wrote Unto This Last (in Cornhill Magazine, 1860) and Munera Pulveris (in Fraser's Magazine, 1862-63). These works attacked bourgeois England and charged that modern art reflected the ugliness and waste of modern industry.

Ruskin's positive program for social reform appeared in Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide (1867), and Fors Clavigera (8 vol., 1871-84). Many of his suggested programs—old age pensions, nationalization of education, organization of labor—have become accepted doctrine. He was made the first professor of art in England (Slade professor, Oxford, 1870) and his lectures were well attended. His multifarious activities broke down his health, however, and in 1878 he suffered his first period of insanity. Recurrences of unbalance became more frequent, though some of his greatest prose, the autobiography Praeterita (1885-89), was written in the lucid intervals.

• John Ruskin (1819-1900), an English author, poet and artist, most famous for his work as art critic and social critic, and for his writing on the architecture of Venice.

A number of institutions and locations have been named after John Ruskin, including two places in the United States and one in Canada. For a short period "Ruskin" was also adopted as a forename.

Places

• Ruskin, British Columbia, Canada

In the United States:

• Ruskin, Florida
• Ruskin, Georgia
• Ruskin, Nebraska
• Ruskin Colony, a utopian socialist colony which existed in Dickson County, Tennessee from 1894 to 1899 (the Florida and British Columbia Ruskins were also Ruskinite colonies)

Institutions

• Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge, England
• "The Ruskin", the colloquial short form for The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University
• Ruskin College, Oxford, an adult education college named after John Ruskin

Forename

• Ruskin Bond, an Indian author of British descent
• Ruskin Spear, a British painter