Ruskin
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
JOHN, an English author; born in London, Feb. 8, 1819. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford; gained the Newdigate prize in 1839, and graduated al of Pennsyl-medigaten diraduated lecturer at Cambridge, and in 1870-1872, 1876-1878, 1883-1885, he was Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, where in 1871 he gave $25,000 for the endowment of a university teacher of drawing. In "Modern Painters" he advocated a complete revolution in the received conventions of art and art criticism. Ruskin was the first art critic to place criticism upon a scientific basis. In 1851 he appeared as a defender of pre-Raphaelitism. About 1860 he began to write as a political economist and social reformer; his chief works in this sphere being "Unto this Last" (1862); "Munera Pulveris" (1872); and "Fors Clavigera" (1871- 1884), a periodical series of letters to the working men and laborers of Great Britain. In this connection he founded in 1871, "The Guild of St. George"; founded a linen industry at Keswick, and revived, in Langdale, hand-loom weaving. His chief works, apart from pamphlets and contributions to periodicals, are: "Modern Painters" (1843-1860); "Seven Lamps of Architecture"; "Poems" (1850); "King of the Golden River" (1851), a fairy legend; "The Stones of Venice" (1851-1853); "Giotto and his Works at Padua" (1854); " Lectures on Architecture and Painting" (1854) Notes the Royal Academy" (1855-1859 and 1875); the letterpress accompanying "Turner's Harbors of Engcompanying land" (1856); ; "Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House" (1857); "Catalogue of Turner's Sketches at the National Gallery" (1857); "Elements of Drawing" (1857); "Political Economy of Art" (1857), better known as "A Joy Forever"; "Sesame and Lilies" (1865); "Ethics of the Dust" (1866); "Crown of Wild Olive" (1866); "Lectures on Art" (1870); "Aratra Pentelici" (1872); "Love's Meinie" (1873); "Val d'Arno" (1874); "Proserpina" (1875); "Deucalion" (1875); "Mornings in Florence" (1875); "Frondes Agrestes" (1875-1876); "Elements of English Prosody" (1880); "Fiction, Fair and Foul, in the 19th_Century" (1880-1881); “Our Fathers Have Told Us" (1881); "Lectures on the Art of England" (1883); "On the Pleasures of England" (1884); "Hortus Inclusus" (1887), a selection of letters; and "Præterita," an autobiography (1885-1889). After 1885 he lived at Brantwood, on Coniston Lake, where he died Jan. 20, 1900.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's 1921 entry sticks to bibliography and calls Ruskin "the first art critic to place criticism upon a scientific basis" — a claim few would make today, when he is read as a moralist and prose stylist rather than a scientist of art. It says nothing of his private life, which now dominates popular treatment: the 1854 annulment of his marriage to Effie Gray, unconsummated after six years, and his attachment to the young Rose La Touche have been the subject of biographies, plays and the 2014 film Effie Gray. His reputation as a critic sank for much of the twentieth century and then revived, while the social writing Collier's lists almost in passing proved the more durable half: Gandhi paraphrased Unto This Last into Gujarati in 1908, and it shaped early Labour and cooperative thinking in Britain. Brantwood, where he died in 1900, has been open to the public as a museum since the 1930s, and his Guild of St George still operates; the 2019 bicentenary brought a wave of exhibitions.
Written for this edition, 2026.