John Ruskin was unfortunate enough to write too many books and live too long. As a person that thought and lived in a highly visual and mind centred world of his own he was bound to be almost incomprehsible to most of those that came after him. I have now read Stones of Venice, Patoretia (his autobiography), Elements of Drawing and a few of his Lectures. From this starting point I’ll try to revive him as a broad thinker of the modern type and a man who achieved far more than was his aim in life, or for that matter in art.

In the context of modern art Ruskin was fortunate to know Turner the great colourist and interpreter of his world. Much of what Ruskin found in art and architecture was related to the past but he also attempted to influence the direction of art into the future. In over 40 years of writing he exposed gradual changes in his opinions and in his understanding of the world around him. Not suprisingly he often wrote of an ideal position in art that was then pursued by artists in quite varied ways, to add to the difficulties of his readers he quite often altered his position on all but the most basic technical  levels of observation.

Religion played an important part in much of his writing, in this he often sounds like a religiously oriented modern American. For those of us without a religious bent this preoccupation is quite often confusing if not completely off putting. Even Ruskin’s attitude to religion changed during his life time and this is reflected in his writings, his autobiography perhaps placing his most accurate representation of his move away from religious preoccupation or dominance. For the reader it is not impossible to view Ruskins religious statements as an organised spirituality that promoted the general good and asked his readers to venerate life in a refined uplifting way.

Ruskin was an independently wealthy man as were so many people involved in the arts at the time. His views on some issues are of course quite shocking, such as his questioning the value of education for the less fortunate (a view shared by Dega, Moore etc). In many respects he sought to reject the cancerous nature of the industrial revolution, in particular the reduction of the workers to nothing more than machines producing goods with which their input was the repetition of an action rather than the application of their own thinking. Unfortunately the cynicism of the middle class was to over power his view and by the end of his life he was regarded as a dreamer, despite the obvious degradation of the worker to little more than animals.

We are constantly reminded today that the Impressionists gave us the, at the time, odd idea of colouring shadows in paintings. Ruskin put forward the concept of warmth and colour in shadows long before Monet and co were influential. We have to admit that Goethe put this view long before Ruskin and that German artists used this approach in the 1830s, followed by the Pre-Raphelites (under the influence of Ruskin) in the 1850s. How the Impressionists gained the credit for this is a touch lost on me.

Another of the approaches that the Impressionists are supposed to have given us is to visually reduce scenes they were undertaking to paint to areas of colour to place on the canvas. Ruskin and many before him were fully aware that to bring an image to the canvas this is exactly what the artist had to do. Perhaps this misconception was understandable in France where the five step academic method was an accepted standard approach that limited the use of this principle. The only point on which Ruskin can be seen to differ in this direct colour approach is that he did not abandon the concept of blending to achieve an effect, as did the colour emphasising impressionists.

I’ll return to this occassional series later in the year.