title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha has worked with Lata-patrons like Laxmikant–Pyarelal, Naushad Ali, Ravindra Jain, N. Dutta and Hemant Kumar. When Naushad was asked to sum up the essential difference between Lata and Asha, he said that Asha "lacks certain something which Lata, and Lata alone has." Later he stated in an interview, "Maybe I said it because I then had a closed ear on Asha". Naushad, later in his life, also admitted that he has been unfair to Asha. Asha has also worked with other noted Hindi film composers like Jatin–Lalit, Bappi Lahiri, Kalyanji-Anandji, Usha Khanna, Chitragupt, and Roshan.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In a rare feat, noted lyricist Gulzar, music director R.D. Burman and Asha Bhosle came together in 1987 to create a double album, titled "Dil Padosi Hai", which was released on 8 September 1987. In 1995, Asha underwent the "gatha bandan" (thread-tying) ceremony with Hindustani classical music maestro Ali Akbar Khan to learn a classical repertoire held within the Maihar "gharana" (stylistic school of Indian classical music), as handed down to Khan by his father Allauddin Khan (the guru of Ravi Shankar). Later, Asha and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan recorded eleven fixed compositions (or "bandish"es) in California for "Legacy", a private album that earned them a Grammy Award nomination.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In the 1990s, Asha experimented with remixed R.D. Burman songs. She was criticized by many, including Khayyam, for tampering with old melodies. Nevertheless, albums like "Rahul And I" became quite popular. In 1997, Asha did a private Indipop album "Janam Samjha Karo" with Lesle Lewis. The album was hugely popular and won her many awards including the 1997 MTV Award.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha had been once asked by director B. R. Ishara to compose music for one of his films, but she had politely declined. In 2002, she turned music composer with the album "Aap Ki Asha", an eight-song music and video album. The lyrics were written by Majrooh Sultanpuri. The album was released by Sachin Tendulkar on 21 May 2001 at a lavish party in Mumbai. The album received mixed reviews.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha had spotted Pakistani singer Adnan Sami's talent when he was about 10 years old. At that time, she was performing in London with R. D. Burman. It was she who had asked him to pursue his interests in music. When Adnan grew up and became a professional musician, Asha sang the title duet with him for his best-selling album "Kabhi to nazar milao". The two came together again in the album "Barse Badal". The album comprises eight songs, based on Indian Classical music. She contributed the song "Yun Na Thi" to the recording "Womad Talking Book Volume Four: An Introduction to Asia 1" on Womad Records.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha has sung ghazals for many albums like "Meraj-E-Ghazal", "Aabshar-e-Ghazal" and "Kashish". In 2005, Asha released a self-titled album as a tribute to the four ghazal maestros – Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, Farida Khanum and Jagjit Singh. The album features eight of her favorite ghazals like Farida Khanum's "Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo", Ghulam Ali's "Chupke Chupke", "Aawargi" and "Dil Mein Ek Lahar", Jagjit Singh's "Ahista Ahista" and Mehdi Hassan's "Ranjish Hi Sahi", "Rafta Rafta" and "Mujhe Tum Nazar Se". These classic ghazals were recreated with modern sounds by musician Pandit Somesh Mathur. The album was aimed at the younger generation, who, according to Asha, are "turned off" by the traditional sounds of tabla and sarangi.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Numerous compilations of Asha's songs have been released as well. To commemorate her 60th birthday, EMI India released three cassettes: "Bala Main Bairagan Hoongi" (devotional songs), "The Golden Collection: Memorable Ghazals" (non-film ghazals by composers such as Ghulam Ali, R.D. Burman and Nazar Hussain), and "The Golden Collection: The Ever Versatile Asha Bhosle" (44 popular film songs).


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 1996, Asha Bhosle sang Channeache Rati among several other songs in Rajendra Talak's Konkani album "Daryachya Deger" with Suresh Wadkar.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2006, she recorded an album "Asha and Friends", singing duets, with film actors Sanjay Dutt and Urmila Matondkar and famous cricket player Brett Lee, with whom she sang, "You're the One for Me" ("Haan Main Tumhara Hoon"). All these songs composed by Shamir Tandon were shot on video by journalist turned director S. Ramachandran.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2014, she sang a song titled "Dil Lagane Ko Dil Jab" for the International Women's Day special album, "". It was composed by Shamir Tandon and penned by Saajan Agarwal.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2015, Asha Bhosle recorded a Sufi song, "Fariyad Sun Fakira" with co-singers Javed Ali and Pankaj Kumar.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2016, she recorded the album "82" with music director Mandar Agashe who decorated six of Suresh Bhat's ghazals with his musical touch of pop, reggae, blues, and rock. The album was named after her age at the time of recording. About the album "82", Bhosle said, "I had a long association with Suresh Bhat and have a lot of memories about him. With this album, I will relive those memories. I don't need to tell you how powerful his words were and, with the album, that power can be experienced again. Mr. Bhat always wanted to record these ghazals in the pop and rock genres and it is good to see Mandar fulfilling that wish. I just wish Mr. Bhat was among us today."


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown throughout the nation, Bhosle along with many noted artists like S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, Udit Narayan, Kailash Kher, Usha Uthup, Shaan, Alka Yagnik, Sonu Nigam and other 200 artists of India, made a song named 'Jayatu Jayatu Bharatam' to make the country unite during the pandemic.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In the 1980s and 1990s, Asha went globe-trotting, staging concerts in Canada, Dubai, UK, US and many other countries. In October 2002, she did a concert with Sudesh Bhosle and others, in London, for "Help the Aged" to help raise funds for the elderly in India. In 2007 she toured the US, Canada, and West Indies in a tour called "The Incredibles". In this tour, she was accompanied by singers Sonu Nigam, Kunal Ganjawala and Kailash Kher. This tour, originally scheduled for only 12 concerts, went on to run more than 20.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In the early 1990s, Asha sang with Boy George ("Bow Down Mister") and Stephen Lauscombe. In 1997, she sang a love song with the boy band Code Red, at the age of 64. She also recorded the song "The Way you Dream" (One Giant Leap), with Michael Stipe that was used in the English movie, "Bulletproof Monk". The song was also released on the album "1 Giant Leap" for 2002.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 1997, the British band Cornershop paid tribute to Asha with their song "Brimful of Asha," an international hit which was later remixed by Fatboy Slim. In 2001, the CD single of Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird" included a "Nellie vs. Asha Remix" created by Digital Cutup Lounge.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2003, British opera pop singer Sarah Brightman sampled her song "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" on her album "Harem". It was used as the intro for her song "You Take My Breath Away".


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2005, American string quartet Kronos Quartet re-recorded R D Burman compositions like "Chura Liya", "Piya Tu" and "Mera Kuchh Saaman" among others and got Asha to sing them. Despite her age, she recorded three to four songs a day, leaving the quartet members stupefied. On 23 August 2005, "You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood" was released in US. The album was nominated for Grammy Awards 2006 in the category of "Best Contemporary World Music Album". In the 1990s, a friend had introduced David Harrington of Kronos Quartet to the song "Aaj ki raat." Harrington was mesmerised, and the song ended up on the album "Kronos Caravan".


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Also in 2005, The Black Eyed Peas sampled her songs "Ae Naujawan Sab Kuchh Yahan" ("Apradh", 1972) and "Yeh Mera Dil Pyaar Ka Diwana" ("Don", 1978) in their hit single "Don't Phunk with My Heart". In late 2006, Asha collaborated with Australian test cricket star, Brett Lee. The single, "You're the One for Me", debuted at number 4 on the charts and reached a peak position of number 2.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In 2006 Asha recorded one song for the soundtrack of the Pakistani movie "Mein Ek Din Laut Kay Aaaonga". She sang the song titled "Dil Key Taar Bajey", with famous Pakistani pop singer Jawad Ahmed. It was aired as part of the film's promotional campaign and became very popular, featuring on top music charts.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha Bhosle sang her first Bengali song in 1958 under the banner of HMV. The songs were duets with Binod Chattopadhyay and composed by Manna Dey. The following year, she recorded her very first "Pooja Songs" from HMV with music arranged by Dey again. She sang many pooja songs in Bengali.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Rahul converted some Hindi tracks to Bengali such as "Gunjone Dole Je Bhramar" (made from Gunguna Rahe Hain Bawre in Aradhana), "Chokhe Name Bristi" (from "Jane Kya Baat Hai"), "Gungun Gunje" (from "Pyaar Deewana Hota Hain"). In the mid 1970s, she would frequently sing for Bengali songs tuned by Sudhin Dasgupta, Nachiketa Ghosh rtc. In 1975, she sang the duet "Sara Pyaar Tumhara" with Kishore Kumar in "Anand Ashram" and "Amar Swapno Tumi" in its Bengali version with the same title. In the 1970s, she sang a lot of songs in films such as "Chhadmabeshi", "Bandi", "Mouchak", "Anand Ashram" etc. In 1980, she sang the Bhajan "Kunjo Bihari He Giridhari" in "Mayer Ashirbad". In 1981, she sang the duet "Adho Alo Chhayate" with Kishore in "Kalankini Kankanati". In 1982, she sang a Bengali Adhunik song "Kotha Hoyechilo" in "Troyee" for Debasri Roy. In 1986, the duet with Kishore Kumar "Chiridini Tumi Je Amar" composed by Bappi Lahiri. In 2014, she has created the album "Pancham Tumi Kothay" in honor of her husband Rahul Dev Burman's 75th birth anniversary. In this album she has sung 8 songs previously composed by Burman. She has also sung in a 2014 film "Parapar" at the age of 81.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha started her playback singing in Marathi with the mythological film Gokulcha raja. Since then Asha Bhosle has sung thousands of Marathi film songs, Bhavgeet (non-film songs). Natya sangeet from Master Deenanath Mangeshkar's Marathi Sangeet natak has also been recorded in Asha Bhosle's voice. During the 1950s and 60s, Asha and her sister Lata were the main playback singers for Marathi films. She won the 1962 Maharashtra government best singer award for the Marathi film, "Manini". In 1963 music director Vasant Desai used her voice with Talat Mehmood in the film, Molkarin.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Some Marathi films in which Asha Bhosle has rendered her voice are: Molkarin, Jait re Jait, Gharkul, Devbappa, Sangtye Aika, Singhasan, Saamna, Maratha Tituka Melvava, and Nivdung.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha's house is situated in Prabhukunj Apt on the Peddar Road area of South Mumbai. Asha, at the age of 16, had eloped with 31-year-old Ganpatrao Bhosle. They separated in 1960. They have three children and five grandchildren. The eldest of her three children, Hemant Bhosle (named after Hemant Kumar), spent most of his early years as a pilot and quit to have a brief career as a music director. Bhosle's daughter Varsha committed suicide on 8 October 2012; she was 56 years old and worked as a columnist for "The Sunday Observer" and "Rediff".


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha's youngest child, Anand Bhosle, has studied business and film direction. He manages Asha's career. Her grandson, Chaitanya (Chintu) Bhosle (Hemant's son) is a part of the world of music. He is a member of India's first & only boy band, "A Band of Boys". Her sisters Lata and Usha Mangeshkar are playback singers. Her other, sister Meena Mangeshkar and brother Hridaynath Mangeshkar are music directors. Her granddaughter Zanai Bhosle (daughter of Anand Bhosle) runs iAzure Apple Inc. Store in Mumbai. Zanai is an emerging singer and Kathak dancer and had sung with Asha Bhosle.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Hemant Bhosle 's best known compositions were the Kishore-Asha duets such as "Aji Kaho Kya Haal Hai" from "Anpadh" picturised on Vijendra Ghatke and "Sarika" and "Salamat Raho Tum" from the same film "Anpadh" picturised on Ashok Kumar and Sarika. Hemant died of cancer in 2015.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha's first husband Ganpatrao was her personal secretary. Their marriage failed miserably in 1960. Her husband and in-laws mistreated her. After a few years of marriage, Asha was turned out by a suspicious Ganpatrao and she went to her maternal home with two children while pregnant with her third child. She continued to sing in films to earn money. Asha married Rahul Dev Burman in 1980. This was the second marriage for both Rahul and Asha. Rahul, 6 years younger than her, earlier got divorced from Rita Patel in 1971.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha is an excellent cook and cooking is her favorite hobby. She often gets flooded with requests by Hind film celebrities for "kadai ghosht" and "biryani" dishes and has rarely turned down a request. In fact, her "paya curry", "Goan fish curry" and "dal" are very popular with the Kapoor family of Hindi films. Once, when asked in a "The Times of India" interview, what if her singing career had not taken off, she said "I would have become a cook. I'd have cooked in four houses and made money." The love of cooking got Asha into a successful restaurant business. She runs restaurants in Dubai and Kuwait called Asha's. Asha's offers traditional north-western Indian cuisine. It has a presence in the Wafi City development in Dubai, as well as three restaurants in Kuwait, at The Avenues Mall, the Marina Mall and a brand new third outlet at the Spoons Complex. Other restaurants can be found in Abu Dhabi's Khaldiya Mall, Doha's Villagio and Bahrain's City Center Mall, with future outposts planned for Dubai's Mall of the Emirates and Cairo, Egypt. Asha Bhosle has a 20% stake in the business. Asha is not involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurant which is looked after by the Wafi Group. She takes care of the kitchen and the décor. She personally trained the chefs for almost six months. According to a December 2004 report in Menu Magazine, Russell Scott, a former head of Harry Ramsden's (the fish and chips chain), secured the UK rights to the Asha's brand and planned to open up to 40 restaurants over the next five years. As part of her chain of restaurants, Asha has recently opened a new restaurant in Birmingham, UK. Asha Bhosle will be on view at the Madame Tussauds gallery that opens in New Delhi soon.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha's sibling rivalry with Lata Mangeshkar is often talked about, in spite of their insistence that these are just tales. As young children, they were very close. As a child, Lata used to carry Asha all the time. They were so inseparable that when Lata went to school she would take Asha with her. One day the teacher protested and said that they cannot have two students on one fee. Lata refused to return to school without Asha and quit her studies.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Lata considered Asha's act of eloping with her lover as irresponsible, leaving her alone to sing and earn for the family. This led to tensions between them. Asha herself stated in an interview – "It was a love marriage and Lata "didi" did not speak to me for a long time. She disapproved of the alliance." At one time, their relationship was very adversarial and there have been periods of non-communication.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: In her initial days in the industry, Asha always played second fiddle to her elder sister. Some say that Lata had once criticised Asha's relationship with O. P. Nayyar. This widened the rift between the two sisters and O. P. Nayyar also decided that he would never work with Lata. O. P. Nayyar had once revealed that "Asha and Lata, staying in opposite flats at Bombay's Peddar Road, shared a maid. Said maid's responsibility was to come and tell the younger sister that Lata had just recorded something wonderful for Asha to lose her vocal poise. Such was her Lata phobia that it took me some months to convince Asha that she had a voice individualistic enough to evolve a singing style all of her own." Asha once said that she has worked for years to create a voice and a style that was different from Lata, so that she could carve her own niche and not be banished to live in her sister's shadow.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha and Lata have also sung together. Their first duet was for the film "Daman" (1951). Some of their songs include "Man Bhawan Ke Ghar aye" ("Chori Chori", 1956), "Sakhi ri sun bole papihaa us paar" ("Miss Mary", 1957), "O chand jahaan woh jayein" ("Sharada", 1957), "Mere Mehboob Mein Kya Nahi" ("Mere Mehboob", 1963), "Unse Nazrein Mili" ("Gazal", 1964), "Ai kash kisi deewane ko" ("Aaye Din Bahar Ke", 1966), "Jabse Laagi Toose Najariya" ("Shikar, 1968"), "Main Haseena Nazneena Koi Mujhsa Nahi" "(Baazi, 1968)", "Main Chali Main Chali" ("Padosan", 1968), "Chhap tilak sab" ("Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki", 1978), and "Man kyun behka" ("Utsav", 1984). While singing, Lata used to hold her notebook in her right hand, while Asha held hers in the left hand. This meant Lata had her face away from Asha, making it difficult for them to "anticipate" each other.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: The movie "Saaz" was supposedly based on Lata and Asha's rivalry. Asha said about the movie – "To have two women in long plaits, take a couple of incidents and exaggerate them into a 3-hour film is such a waste of time." In the last few years, Asha and Lata have often been seen in public, enjoying each other's company. In an interview with "The Times of India", Asha once said – "I remember, sometimes both of us would be at a function and some industry types would ignore me and interact only with her, as if to prove their loyalty. Later, didi and I would have a good laugh!"


title: Asha Bhosle

text: British alternative rock band Cornershop released "Brimful of Asha" in 1997. The song, dedicated to Asha Bhosle, became an international hit single for the band and topped the UK Singles Chart in February 1998. A number of remixes have been released as well, notably by Norman Cook, also known as Fatboy Slim.


title: Asha Bhosle

text: Asha Bhosle has won seven Filmfare Best Female Playback Awards of 18 nominations. She won her first two awards in 1967 and 1968. (Mangeshkar asked not to be considered for the award nominations after 1969 to promote new talent). After receiving the award in 1979, Bhosle emulated her elder sister and requested that her name not be considered for the nominations hereafter. Despite this, Bhosle is the most frequent winner of this award to date, tying with Alka Yagnik. She was later given a "Special Award" for "Rangeela" in 1996, and the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Following is the list of her Filmfare Awards:


title: John Ruskin

text: John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of "Modern Painters" (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. "Unto This Last" (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title "Fors Clavigera" (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was the only child of first cousins. His father, John James Ruskin (1785–1864), was a sherry and wine importer, founding partner and "de facto" business manager of Ruskin, Telford and Domecq (see Allied Domecq). John James was born and brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a mother from Glenluce and a father originally from Hertfordshire. His wife, Margaret Cock (1781–1871), was the daughter of a publican in Croydon. She had joined the Ruskin household when she became companion to John James's mother, Catherine.


title: John Ruskin

text: John James had hoped to practise law, and was articled as a clerk in London. His father, John Thomas Ruskin, described as a grocer (but apparently an ambitious wholesale merchant), was an incompetent businessman. To save the family from bankruptcy, John James, whose prudence and success were in stark contrast to his father, took on all debts, settling the last of them in 1832. John James and Margaret were engaged in 1809, but opposition to the union from John Thomas, and the problem of his debts, delayed the couple's wedding. They finally married, without celebration, in 1818. John James died on 3 March 1864 and is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, Croydon.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London (demolished 1969), south of St Pancras railway station. His childhood was shaped by the contrasting influences of his father and mother, both of whom were fiercely ambitious for him. John James Ruskin helped to develop his son's Romanticism. They shared a passion for the works of Byron, Shakespeare and especially Walter Scott. They visited Scott's home, Abbotsford, in 1838, but Ruskin was disappointed by its appearance. Margaret Ruskin, an evangelical Christian, more cautious and restrained than her husband, taught young John to read the Bible from beginning to end, and then to start all over again, committing large portions to memory. Its language, imagery and parables had a profound and lasting effect on his writing. He later wrote:


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's childhood was spent from 1823 at 28 Herne Hill (demolished ), near the village of Camberwell in South London. He had few friends of his own age, but it was not the friendless and toyless experience he later said it was in his autobiography, "Praeterita" (1885–89). He was educated at home by his parents and private tutors, including Congregationalist preacher Edward Andrews, whose daughters, Mrs Eliza Orme and Emily Augusta Patmore were later credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.


title: John Ruskin

text: From 1834 to 1835 he attended the school in Peckham run by the progressive evangelical Thomas Dale (1797–1870). Ruskin heard Dale lecture in 1836 at King's College, London, where Dale was the first Professor of English Literature. Ruskin went on to enroll and complete his studies at King's College, where he prepared for Oxford under Dale's tutelage.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the Lake District (his first long poem, "Iteriad", was an account of his tour in 1830) and to relatives in Perth, Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited France and Belgium. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.


title: John Ruskin

text: These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in "Friendship's Offering". His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by Samuel Rogers's poem "Italy" (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of Samuel Prout, whose "Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany" (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's journeys also provided inspiration for writing. His first publication was the poem "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" (originally entitled "Lines written at the Lakes in Cumberland: Derwentwater" and published in the "Spiritual Times") (August 1829). In 1834, three short articles for Loudon's "Magazine of Natural History" were published. They show early signs of his skill as a close "scientific" observer of nature, especially its geology.


title: John Ruskin

text: From September 1837 to December 1838, Ruskin's "The Poetry of Architecture" was serialised in Loudon's "Architectural Magazine", under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "According to Nature"). It was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings centred on a Wordsworthian argument that buildings should be sympathetic to their immediate environment and use local materials. It anticipated key themes in his later writings. In 1839, Ruskin's "Remarks on the Present State of Meteorological Science" was published in "Transactions of the Meteorological Society".


title: John Ruskin

text: In Michaelmas 1836, Ruskin matriculated at the University of Oxford, taking up residence at Christ Church in January of the following year. Enrolled as a gentleman-commoner, he enjoyed equal status with his aristocratic peers. Ruskin was generally uninspired by Oxford and suffered bouts of illness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of his time there was in the few, close friendships he made. His tutor, the Rev Walter Lucas Brown, always encouraged him, as did a young senior tutor, Henry Liddell (later the father of Alice Liddell) and a private tutor, the Reverend Osborne Gordon. He became close to the geologist and natural theologian William Buckland. Among his fellow undergraduates, Ruskin's most important friends were Charles Thomas Newton and Henry Acland.


title: John Ruskin

text: His most noteworthy success came in 1839 when, at the third attempt, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (Arthur Hugh Clough came second). He met William Wordsworth, who was receiving an honorary degree, at the ceremony.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's health was poor and he never became independent from his family during his time at Oxford. His mother took lodgings on High Street, where his father joined them at weekends. He was devastated to hear that his first love, Adèle Domecq, the second daughter of his father's business partner, had become engaged to a French nobleman. In April 1840, whilst revising for his examinations, he began to cough blood, which led to fears of consumption and a long break from Oxford travelling with his parents.


title: John Ruskin

text: Before he returned to Oxford, Ruskin responded to a challenge that had been put to him by Effie Gray, whom he later married: the twelve-year-old Effie had asked him to write a fairy story. During a six-week break at Leamington Spa to undergo Dr Jephson's (1798–1878) celebrated salt-water cure, Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction, the fable "The King of the Golden River" (not published until December 1850 (but imprinted 1851), with illustrations by Richard Doyle). A work of Christian sacrificial morality and charity, it is set in the Alpine landscape Ruskin loved and knew so well. It remains the most translated of all his works. Back at Oxford, in 1842 Ruskin sat for a pass degree, and was awarded an uncommon honorary double fourth-class degree in recognition of his achievements.


title: John Ruskin

text: For much of the period from late 1840 to autumn 1842, Ruskin was abroad with his parents, mainly in Italy. His studies of Italian art were chiefly guided by George Richmond, to whom the Ruskins were introduced by Joseph Severn, a friend of Keats (whose son, Arthur Severn, later married Ruskin's cousin, Joan). He was galvanised into writing a defence of J. M. W. Turner when he read an attack on several of Turner's pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. It recalled an attack by the critic Rev John Eagles in "Blackwood's Magazine" in 1836, which had prompted Ruskin to write a long essay. John James had sent the piece to Turner, who did not wish it to be published. It finally appeared in 1903.


title: John Ruskin

text: Before Ruskin began "Modern Painters", John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner. Both painters were among occasional guests of the Ruskins at Herne Hill, and 163 Denmark Hill (demolished 1947) to which the family moved in 1842.


title: John Ruskin

text: What became the first volume of "Modern Painters" (1843), published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the anonymous authority of "A Graduate of Oxford", was Ruskin's answer to Turner's critics. Ruskin controversially argued that modern landscape painters—and in particular Turner—were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post-Renaissance period. Ruskin maintained that, unlike Turner, Old Masters such as Gaspard Dughet (Gaspar Poussin), Claude, and Salvator Rosa favoured pictorial convention, and not "truth to nature". He explained that he meant "moral as well as material truth". The job of the artist is to observe the reality of nature and not to invent it in a studioto render imaginatively on canvas what he has seen and understood, free of any rules of composition. For Ruskin, modern landscapists demonstrated superior understanding of the "truths" of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation, a profound appreciation of which Ruskin demonstrated in his own prose. He described works he had seen at the National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery with extraordinary verbal felicity.


title: John Ruskin

text: Although critics were slow to react and the reviews were mixed, many notable literary and artistic figures were impressed with the young man's work, including Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Suddenly Ruskin had found his métier, and in one leap helped redefine the genre of art criticism, mixing a discourse of polemic with aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics. It cemented Ruskin's relationship with Turner. After the artist died in 1851, Ruskin catalogued nearly 20,000 sketches that Turner gave to the British nation.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, Rose La Touche). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote. It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.


title: John Ruskin

text: Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of "Modern Painters" (published April 1846). The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God". In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with Joshua Reynolds difficult to accept. In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even poet laureate, just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.


title: John Ruskin

text: During 1847, Ruskin became closer to Euphemia "Effie" Gray, the daughter of family friends. It was for her that Ruskin had written "The King of the Golden River". The couple were engaged in October. They married on 10 April 1848 at her home, Bowerswell, in Perth, once the residence of the Ruskin family. It was the site of the suicide of John Thomas Ruskin (Ruskin's grandfather). Owing to this association and other complications, Ruskin's parents did not attend. The European Revolutions of 1848 meant that the newlyweds' earliest travels together were restricted, but they were able to visit Normandy, where Ruskin admired the Gothic architecture.


title: John Ruskin

text: Their early life together was spent at 31 Park Street, Mayfair, secured for them by Ruskin's father (later addresses included nearby 6 Charles Street, and 30 Herne Hill). Effie was too unwell to undertake the European tour of 1849, so Ruskin visited the Alps with his parents, gathering material for the third and fourth volumes of "Modern Painters". He was struck by the contrast between the Alpine beauty and the poverty of Alpine peasants, stirring his increasingly sensitive social conscience.


title: John Ruskin

text: The marriage was unhappy, with Ruskin reportedly being cruel to Effie and distrustful of her. The marriage was never consummated and was annulled six years later in 1854.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849). It contained 14 plates etched by the author. The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience. All would provide recurring themes in his future work. "Seven Lamps" promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of architect A. W. N. Pugin.


title: John Ruskin

text: In November 1849, John and Effie Ruskin visited Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli. Their different personalities are revealed by their contrasting priorities. For Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while Ruskin was engaged in solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, because he feared that they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. One of these troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, became friendly with Effie, apparently with Ruskin's consent. Her brother, among others, later claimed that Ruskin was deliberately encouraging the friendship to compromise her, as an excuse to separate.


title: John Ruskin

text: Meanwhile, Ruskin was making the extensive sketches and notes that he used for his three-volume work "The Stones of Venice" (1851–53). Developing from a technical history of Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, "Stones" represented Ruskin's opinion of contemporary England. It served as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had degenerated slowly. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.


title: John Ruskin

text: The chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" appeared in the second volume of "Stones". Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery.


title: John Ruskin

text: This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. This chapter had a profound effect, and was reprinted both by the Christian socialist founders of the Working Men's College and later by the Arts and Crafts pioneer and socialist William Morris.


title: John Ruskin

text: John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite commitment to 'naturalism' – "paint[ing] from nature only", depicting nature in fine detail, had been influenced by Ruskin.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin became acquainted with Millais after the artists made an approach to Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore. Initially, Ruskin had not been impressed by Millais's "Christ in the House of His Parents" (1849–50), a painting that was considered blasphemous at the time, but Ruskin wrote letters defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to "The Times" during May 1851. Providing Millais with artistic patronage and encouragement, in the summer of 1853 the artist (and his brother) travelled to Scotland with Ruskin and Effie where, at Glenfinlas, he painted the closely observed landscape background of gneiss rock to which, as had always been intended, he later added Ruskin's portrait.


title: John Ruskin

text: Millais had painted a picture of Effie for "The Order of Release, 1746", exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. Suffering increasingly from physical illness and acute mental anxiety, Effie was arguing fiercely with her husband and his intense and overly protective parents, and sought solace with her own parents in Scotland. The Ruskin marriage was already undermined as she and Millais fell in love, and Effie left Ruskin, causing a public scandal.


title: John Ruskin

text: During April 1854, Effie filed her suit of nullity, on grounds of "non-consummation" owing to his "incurable impotency", a charge Ruskin later disputed. Ruskin wrote, "I can prove my virility at once." The annulment was granted in July. Ruskin did not even mention it in his diary. Effie married Millais the following year. The complex reasons for the non-consummation and ultimate failure of the Ruskin marriage are a matter of enduring speculation and debate.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin continued to support Hunt and Rossetti. He also provided an annuity of £150 in 1855–57 to Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife, to encourage her art (and paid for the services of Henry Acland for her medical care). Other artists influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites also received both critical and financial assistance from Ruskin, including John Brett, John William Inchbold, and Edward Burne-Jones, who became a good friend (he called him "Brother Ned"). His father's disapproval of such friends was a further cause of tension between them.


title: John Ruskin

text: During this period Ruskin wrote regular reviews of the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the title "Academy Notes" (1855–59, 1875). They were highly influential, capable of making or breaking reputations. The satirical magazine "Punch" published the lines (24 May 1856), "I paints and paints,/hears no complaints/And sells before I'm dry,/Till savage Ruskin/He sticks his tusk in/Then nobody will buy."


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was an art-philanthropist: in March 1861 he gave 48 Turner drawings to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and a further 25 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in May. Ruskin's own work was very distinctive, and he occasionally exhibited his watercolours: in the United States in 1857–58 and 1879, for example; and in England, at the Fine Art Society in 1878, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (of which he was an honorary member) in 1879. He created many careful studies of natural forms, based on his detailed botanical, geological and architectural observations. Examples of his work include a painted, floral pilaster decoration in the central room of Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of his friend Pauline Trevelyan. The stained glass window in the "Little Church of St Francis" Funtley, Fareham, Hampshire is reputed to have been designed by him. Originally placed in the "St. Peter's Church" Duntisbourne Abbots near Cirencester, the window depicts the Ascension and the Nativity.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's theories also inspired some architects to adapt the Gothic style. Such buildings created what has been called a distinctive "Ruskinian Gothic". Through his friendship with Henry Acland, Ruskin supported attempts to establish what became the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (designed by Benjamin Woodward) - which is the closest thing to a model of this style, but still failed to satisfy Ruskin completely. The many twists and turns in the Museum's development, not least its increasing cost, and the University authorities' less than enthusiastic attitude towards it, proved increasingly frustrating for Ruskin.


title: John Ruskin

text: The Museum was part of a wider plan to improve science provision at Oxford, something the University initially resisted. Ruskin's first formal teaching role came about in the mid-1850s, when he taught drawing classes (assisted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at the Working Men's College, established by the Christian socialists, Frederick James Furnivall and Frederick Denison Maurice. Although Ruskin did not share the founders' politics, he strongly supported the idea that through education workers could achieve a crucially important sense of (self-)fulfilment. One result of this involvement was Ruskin's "Elements of Drawing" (1857). He had taught several women drawing, by means of correspondence, and his book represented both a response and a challenge to contemporary drawing manuals. The WMC was also a useful recruiting ground for assistants, on some of whom Ruskin would later come to rely, such as his future publisher, George Allen.


title: John Ruskin

text: From 1859 until 1868, Ruskin was involved with the progressive school for girls at Winnington Hall in Cheshire. A frequent visitor, letter-writer, and donor of pictures and geological specimens to the school, Ruskin approved of the mixture of sports, handicrafts, music and dancing encouraged by its principal, Miss Bell. The association led to Ruskin's sub-Socratic work, "The Ethics of the Dust" (1866), an imagined conversation with Winnington's girls in which he cast himself as the "Old Lecturer". On the surface a discourse on crystallography, it is a metaphorical exploration of social and political ideals. In the 1880s, Ruskin became involved with another educational institution, Whitelands College, a training college for teachers, where he instituted a May Queen festival that endures today. (It was also replicated in the 19th century at the Cork High School for Girls.) Ruskin also bestowed books and gemstones upon Somerville College, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges, which he visited regularly, and was similarly generous to other educational institutions for women.


title: John Ruskin

text: Both volumes III and IV of "Modern Painters" were published in 1856. In "MP" III Ruskin argued that all great art is "the expression of the spirits of great men". Only the morally and spiritually healthy are capable of admiring the noble and the beautiful, and transforming them into great art by imaginatively penetrating their essence. "MP" IV presents the geology of the Alps in terms of landscape painting, and their moral and spiritual influence on those living nearby. The contrasting final chapters, "The Mountain Glory" and "The Mountain Gloom" provide an early example of Ruskin's social analysis, highlighting the poverty of the peasants living in the lower Alps.


title: John Ruskin

text: In addition to leading more formal teaching classes, from the 1850s Ruskin became an increasingly popular public lecturer. His first public lectures were given in Edinburgh, in November 1853, on architecture and painting. His lectures at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester in 1857, were collected as "The Political Economy of Art" and later under Keats's phrase, "A Joy For Ever". In these lectures, Ruskin spoke about how to acquire art, and how to use it, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and that art is an index of a nation's well-being. Individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. The increasingly critical tone and political nature of Ruskin's interventions outraged his father and the "Manchester School" of economists, as represented by a hostile review in the "Manchester Examiner and Times". As the Ruskin scholar Helen Gill Viljoen noted, Ruskin was increasingly critical of his father, especially in letters written by Ruskin directly to him, many of them still unpublished.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin gave the inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858, an institution from which the modern-day Anglia Ruskin University has grown. In "The Two Paths" (1859), five lectures given in London, Manchester, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, Ruskin argued that a 'vital law' underpins art and architecture, drawing on the labour theory of value. (For other addresses and letters, Cook and Wedderburn, vol. 16, pp. 427–87.) The year 1859 also marked his last tour of Europe with his ageing parents, during which they visited Germany and Switzerland.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin had been in Venice when he heard about Turner's death in 1851. Being named an executor to Turner's will was an honour that Ruskin respectfully declined, but later took up. Ruskin's book in celebration of the sea, "The Harbours of England", revolving around Turner's drawings, was published in 1856. In January 1857, Ruskin's "Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1856" was published. He persuaded the National Gallery to allow him to work on the Turner Bequest of nearly 20,000 individual artworks left to the nation by the artist. This involved Ruskin in an enormous amount of work, completed in May 1858, and involved cataloguing, framing and conserving. Four hundred watercolours were displayed in cabinets of Ruskin's own design. Recent scholarship has argued that Ruskin did not, as previously thought, collude in the destruction of Turner's erotic drawings, but his work on the Bequest did modify his attitude towards Turner. (See below, Controversies: Turner's Erotic Drawings.)


title: John Ruskin

text: In 1858, Ruskin was again travelling in Europe. The tour took him from Switzerland to Turin, where he saw Paolo Veronese's "Presentation of the Queen of Sheba". He would later claim (in April 1877) that the discovery of this painting, contrasting starkly with a particularly dull sermon, led to his "unconversion" from Evangelical Christianity. He had, however, doubted his Evangelical Christian faith for some time, shaken by Biblical and geological scholarship that was claimed to have undermined the literal truth and absolute authority of the Bible: "those dreadful hammers!" he wrote to Henry Acland, "I hear the chink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses." This "loss of faith" precipitated a considerable personal crisis. His confidence undermined, he believed that much of his writing to date had been founded on a bed of lies and half-truths. He later returned to Christianity.


title: John Ruskin

text: Although in 1877 Ruskin said that in 1860, "I gave up my art work and wrote "Unto This Last"... the central work of my life" the break was not so dramatic or final. Following his crisis of faith, and urged to political and economic work by his professed "master" Thomas Carlyle, to whom he acknowledged that he "owed more than to any other living writer", Ruskin shifted his emphasis in the late 1850s from art towards social issues. Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on and write about a wide range of subjects including art and, among many other matters, geology (in June 1863 he lectured on the Alps), art practice and judgement ("The Cestus of Aglaia"), botany and mythology ("Proserpina" and "The Queen of the Air"). He continued to draw and paint in watercolours, and to travel extensively across Europe with servants and friends. In 1868, his tour took him to Abbeville, and in the following year he was in Verona (studying tombs for the Arundel Society) and Venice (where he was joined by William Holman Hunt). Yet increasingly Ruskin concentrated his energies on fiercely attacking industrial capitalism, and the utilitarian theories of political economy underpinning it. He repudiated his sometimes grandiloquent style, writing now in plainer, simpler language, to communicate his message straightforwardly.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's social view broadened from concerns about the dignity of labour to consider issues of citizenship and notions of the ideal community. Just as he had questioned aesthetic orthodoxy in his earliest writings, he now dissected the orthodox political economy espoused by John Stuart Mill, based on theories of laissez-faire and competition drawn from the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In his four essays "Unto This Last", Ruskin rejected the division of labour as dehumanising (separating the labourer from the product of his work), and argued that the false "science" of political economy failed to consider the social affections that bind communities together. He articulated an extended metaphor of household and family, drawing on Plato and Xenophon to demonstrate the communal and sometimes sacrificial nature of true economics. For Ruskin, all economies and societies are ideally founded on a politics of social justice. His ideas influenced the concept of the "social economy", characterised by networks of charitable, co-operative and other non-governmental organisations.


title: John Ruskin

text: The essays were originally published in consecutive monthly instalments of the new "Cornhill Magazine" between August and November 1860 (and published in a single volume in 1862). However, the "Cornhill"'s editor, William Makepeace Thackeray, was forced to abandon the series by the outcry of the magazine's largely conservative readership and the fears of a nervous publisher (Smith, Elder & Co.). The reaction of the national press was hostile, and Ruskin was, he claimed, "reprobated in a violent manner". Ruskin's father also strongly disapproved. Others were enthusiastic, including Carlyle, who wrote, "I have read your Paper with exhilaration... Such a thing flung suddenly into half a million dull British heads... will do a great deal of good", declaring that they were "henceforth in a minority of "two"", a notion which Ruskin seconded.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's political ideas, and "Unto This Last" in particular, later proved highly influential. The essays were praised and paraphrased in Gujarati by Mohandas Gandhi, a wide range of autodidacts cited their positive impact, the economist John A. Hobson and many of the founders of the British Labour party credited them as an influence.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin believed in a hierarchical social structure. He wrote "I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school." He believed in man's duty to God, and while he sought to improve the conditions of the poor, he opposed attempts to level social differences and sought to resolve social inequalities by abandoning capitalism in favour of a co-operative structure of society based on obedience and benevolent philanthropy, rooted in the agricultural economy.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's explorations of nature and aesthetics in the fifth and final volume of "Modern Painters" focused on Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner. Ruskin asserted that the components of the greatest artworks are held together, like human communities, in a quasi-organic unity. Competitive struggle is destructive. Uniting "Modern Painters" V and "Unto This Last" is Ruskin's "Law of Help":


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's next work on political economy, redefining some of the basic terms of the discipline, also ended prematurely, when "Fraser's Magazine", under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, cut short his "Essays on Political Economy" (1862–63) (later collected as "Munera Pulveris" (1872)). Ruskin further explored political themes in "Time and Tide" (1867), his letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who had a well-established interest in literary and artistic matters. In these letters, Ruskin promoted honesty in work and exchange, just relations in employment and the need for co-operation.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's sense of politics was not confined to theory. On his father's death in 1864, he inherited an estate worth between £120,000 and £157,000 (the exact figure is disputed). This considerable fortune, inherited from the father he described on his tombstone as "an entirely honest merchant", gave him the means to engage in personal philanthropy and practical schemes of social amelioration. One of his first actions was to support the housing work of Octavia Hill (originally one of his art pupils): he bought property in Marylebone to aid her philanthropic housing scheme. But Ruskin's endeavours extended to the establishment of a shop selling pure tea in any quantity desired at 29 Paddington Street, Paddington (giving employment to two former Ruskin family servants) and crossing-sweepings to keep the area around the British Museum clean and tidy. Modest as these practical schemes were, they represented a symbolic challenge to the existing state of society. Yet his greatest practical experiments would come in his later years.


title: John Ruskin

text: In 1865–66, Ruskin became involved in the controversy surrounding Edward John Eyre's suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion. Mill formed the Jamaica Committee for the purpose of holding Governor Eyre accountable for what they perceived to be his unlawful, inhumane, and unnecessary quelling of the insurrection. In response, the Eyre Defence and Aid Fund was formed to support Eyre for having fulfilled his duty to defend order and save the white population from danger; Carlyle served as the chairman. Ruskin allied with the Defence, writing a letter which appeared in the "Daily Telegraph" in December 1865 ("they are for Liberty, and I am for Lordship; they are Mob's men, and I am a King's man"), donating £100 to the Fund, and giving a speech at Waterloo Place on Pall Mall in September 1866, also reported in the "Telegraph". In addition to this, Ruskin "threw himself into" personal work for the Committee, "enlisting recruits, persuading waverers, combating objections."


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin lectured widely in the 1860s, giving the Rede lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, for example. He spoke at the British Institution on 'Modern Art', the Working Men's Institute, Camberwell on "Work" and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich on 'War.'Ruskin's widely admired lecture, "Traffic", on the relation between taste and morality, was delivered in April 1864 at Bradford Town Hall, to which he had been invited because of a local debate about the style of a new Exchange building. "I do not care about this Exchange", Ruskin told his audience, "because "you" don't!" These last three lectures were published in "The Crown of Wild Olive" (1866).


title: John Ruskin

text: The lectures that comprised "Sesame and Lilies" (published 1865), delivered in December 1864 at the town halls at Rusholme and Manchester, are essentially concerned with education and ideal conduct. "Of Kings' Treasuries" (in support of a library fund) explored issues of reading practice, literature (books of the hour vs. books of all time), cultural value and public education. "Of Queens' Gardens" (supporting a school fund) focused on the role of women, asserting their rights and duties in education, according them responsibility for the household and, by extension, for providing the human compassion that must balance a social order dominated by men. This book proved to be one of Ruskin's most popular, and was regularly awarded as a Sunday School prize. Its reception over time, however, has been more mixed, and twentieth-century feminists have taken aim at "Of Queens' Gardens" in particular, as an attempt to "subvert the new heresy" of women's rights by confining women to the domestic sphere. Although indeed subscribing to the Victorian belief in "separate spheres" for men and women, Ruskin was however unusual in arguing for parity of esteem, a case based on his philosophy that a nation's political economy should be modelled on that of the ideal household.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was unanimously appointed the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in August 1869, though largely through the offices of his friend, Henry Acland. He delivered his inaugural lecture on his 51st birthday in 1870, at the Sheldonian Theatre to a larger-than-expected audience. It was here that he said, "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues... she [England] must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men;—seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on..." It has been claimed that Cecil Rhodes cherished a long-hand copy of the lecture, believing that it supported his own view of the British Empire.


title: John Ruskin

text: In 1871, John Ruskin founded his own art school at Oxford, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. It was originally accommodated within the Ashmolean Museum but now occupies premises on High Street. Ruskin endowed the drawing mastership with £5000 of his own money. He also established a large collection of drawings, watercolours and other materials (over 800 frames) that he used to illustrate his lectures. The School challenged the orthodox, mechanical methodology of the government art schools (the "South Kensington System").


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's lectures were often so popular that they had to be given twice—once for the students, and again for the public. Most of them were eventually published (see Select Bibliography below). He lectured on a wide range of subjects at Oxford, his interpretation of "Art" encompassing almost every conceivable area of study, including wood and metal engraving ("Ariadne Florentina"), the relation of science to art ("The Eagle's Nest") and sculpture ("Aratra Pentelici"). His lectures ranged through myth, ornithology, geology, nature-study and literature. "The teaching of Art...", Ruskin wrote, "is the teaching of all things." Ruskin was never careful about offending his employer. When he criticised Michelangelo in a lecture in June 1871 it was seen as an attack on the large collection of that artist's work in the Ashmolean Museum.


title: John Ruskin

text: Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme on Ferry Hinksey Road at North Hinksey, near Oxford, instigated by Ruskin in 1874, and continuing into 1875, which involved undergraduates in a road-mending scheme. The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin's future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.


title: John Ruskin

text: In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. He was also suffering from increasingly poor health.


title: John Ruskin

text: In January 1871, the month before Ruskin started to lecture the wealthy undergraduates at Oxford University, he began his series of 96 (monthly) "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" under the title "Fors Clavigera" (1871–84). (The letters were published irregularly after the 87th instalment in March 1878.) These letters were personal, dealt with every subject in his oeuvre, and were written in a variety of styles, reflecting his mood and circumstances. From 1873, Ruskin had full control over all his publications, having established George Allen as his sole publisher (see Allen & Unwin).


title: John Ruskin

text: In the July 1877 letter of "Fors Clavigera", Ruskin launched a scathing attack on paintings by James McNeill Whistler exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. He found particular fault with "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket", and accused Whistler of asking two hundred guineas for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler filed a libel suit against Ruskin, but Ruskin was ill when the case went to trial in November 1878, so the artist Edward Burne-Jones and Attorney General Sir John Holker represented him. The trial took place on 25 and 26 November, and many major figures of the art world at the time appeared at the trial. Artist Albert Moore appeared as a witness for Whistler, and artist William Powell Frith appeared for Ruskin. Frith said "the nocturne in black in gold is not in my opinion worth two hundred guineas". Frederic Leighton also agreed to give evidence for Whistler, but in the end could not attend as he had to go to Windsor to be knighted. Edward Burne-Jones, representing Ruskin, also asserted that "Nocturne in Black and Gold" was not a serious work of art. When asked to give reasons, Burne-Jones said he had never seen one painting of night that was successful, but also acknowledged that he saw marks of great labour and artistic skill in the painting. In the end, Whistler won the case, but the jury awarded damages of only a derisory farthing (the smallest coin of the realm) to the artist. Court costs were split between the two parties. Ruskin's were paid by public subscription organised by the Fine Art Society, but Whistler was bankrupt within six months, and was forced to sell his studio. The episode tarnished Ruskin's reputation, and may have accelerated his mental decline. It did nothing to mitigate Ruskin's exaggerated sense of failure in persuading his readers to share in his own keenly felt priorities.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin founded his utopian society, the Guild of St George, in 1871 (although originally it was called St George's Fund, and then St George's Company, before becoming the Guild in 1878). Its aims and objectives were articulated in "Fors Clavigera". A communitarian protest against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it had a hierarchical structure, with Ruskin as its Master, and dedicated members called "Companions". Ruskin wished to show that contemporary life could still be enjoyed in the countryside, with land being farmed by traditional means, in harmony with the environment, and with the minimum of mechanical assistance. He also sought to educate and enrich the lives of industrial workers by inspiring them with beautiful objects. As such, with a tithe (or personal donation) of £7,000, Ruskin acquired land and a collection of art treasures.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin purchased land initially in Totley, near Sheffield, but the agricultural scheme established there by local communists met with only modest success after many difficulties. Donations of land from wealthy and dedicated Companions eventually placed land and property in the Guild's care: in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, called Ruskin Land today; Barmouth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales; Cloughton, in North Yorkshire; Westmill in Hertfordshire; and Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.


title: John Ruskin

text: In principle, Ruskin worked out a scheme for different grades of "Companion", wrote codes of practice, described styles of dress and even designed the Guild's own coins. Ruskin wished to see St George's Schools established, and published various volumes to aid its teaching (his "Bibliotheca Pastorum" or "Shepherd's Library"), but the schools themselves were never established. (In the 1880s, in a venture loosely related to the "Bibliotheca", he supported Francesca Alexander's publication of some of her tales of peasant life.) In reality, the Guild, which still exists today as a charitable education trust, has only ever operated on a small scale.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin also wished to see traditional rural handicrafts revived. St. George's Mill was established at Laxey, Isle of Man, producing cloth goods. The Guild also encouraged independent but allied efforts in spinning and weaving at Langdale, in other parts of the Lake District and elsewhere, producing linen and other goods exhibited by the Home Arts and Industries Association and similar organisations.


title: John Ruskin

text: The Guild's most conspicuous and enduring achievement was the creation of a remarkable collection of art, minerals, books, medieval manuscripts, architectural casts, coins and other precious and beautiful objects. Housed in a cottage museum high on a hill in the Sheffield district of Walkley, it opened in 1875, and was curated by Henry and Emily Swan. Ruskin had written in "Modern Painters" III (1856) that, "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to "see" something, and to tell what it "saw" in a plain way." Through the Museum, Ruskin aimed to bring to the eyes of the working man many of the sights and experiences otherwise reserved for those who could afford to travel across Europe. The original Museum has been digitally recreated online. In 1890, the Museum relocated to Meersbrook Park. The collection is now on display at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin had been introduced to the wealthy Irish La Touche family by Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Maria La Touche, a minor Irish poet and novelist, asked Ruskin to teach her daughters drawing and painting in 1858. Rose La Touche was ten. His first meeting came at a time when Ruskin's own religious faith was under strain. This always caused difficulties for the staunchly Protestant La Touche family who at various times prevented the two from meeting. A chance meeting at the Royal Academy in 1869 was one of the few occasions they came into personal contact. After a long illness, she died on 25 May 1875, at the age of 27. These events plunged Ruskin into despair and led to increasingly severe bouts of mental illness involving a number of breakdowns and delirious visions. The first of these had occurred in 1871 at Matlock, Derbyshire, a town and a county that he knew from his boyhood travels, whose flora, fauna, and minerals helped to form and reinforce his appreciation and understanding of nature.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin turned to spiritualism. He attended seances at Broadlands. Ruskin's increasing need to believe in a meaningful universe and a life after death, both for himself and his loved ones, helped to revive his Christian faith in the 1870s.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin continued to travel, studying the landscapes, buildings and art of Europe. In May 1870 and June 1872 he admired Carpaccio's "St Ursula" in Venice, a vision of which, associated with Rose La Touche, would haunt him, described in the pages of "Fors". In 1874, on his tour of Italy, Ruskin visited Sicily, the furthest he ever travelled.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin embraced the emerging literary forms, the travel guide (and gallery guide), writing new works, and adapting old ones "to give", he said, "what guidance I may to travellers..." "The Stones of Venice" was revised, edited and issued in a new "Travellers' Edition" in 1879. Ruskin directed his readers, the would-be traveller, to look with his cultural gaze at the landscapes, buildings and art of France and Italy: "Mornings in Florence" (1875–77), "The Bible of Amiens" (1880–85) (a close study of its sculpture and a wider history), "St Mark's Rest" (1877–84) and "A Guide to the Principal Pictures in... Venice" (1877).


title: John Ruskin

text: In the 1880s, Ruskin returned to some literature and themes that had been among his favourites since childhood. He wrote about Scott, Byron and Wordsworth in "Fiction, Fair and Foul" (1880) in which, as Seth Reno argues, he describes the devastating effects on the landscape caused by industrialization, a vision Reno sees as a realization of the Anthropocene. He returned to meteorological observations in his lectures, "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century" (1884), describing the apparent effects of industrialisation on weather patterns. Ruskin's "Storm-Cloud" has been seen as foreshadowing environmentalism and related concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ruskin's prophetic writings were also tied to his emotions, and his more general (ethical) dissatisfaction with the modern world with which he now felt almost completely out of sympathy.


title: John Ruskin

text: His last great work was his autobiography, "Praeterita" (1885–89) (meaning, 'Of Past Things'), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill.


title: John Ruskin

text: The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake" that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant, especially as he seemed to be more interested in book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway than in modern art. He also attacked aspects of Darwinian theory with increasing violence, although he knew and respected Darwin personally.


title: John Ruskin

text: In August 1871, Ruskin purchased, from W. J. Linton, the then somewhat dilapidated Brantwood house, on the shores of Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, paying £1500 for it. Brantwood was Ruskin's main home from 1872 until his death. His estate provided a site for more of his practical schemes and experiments: he had an ice house built, and the gardens comprehensively rearranged. He oversaw the construction of a larger harbour (from where he rowed his boat, the "Jumping Jenny"), and he altered the house (adding a dining room, a turret to his bedroom to give him a panoramic view of the lake, and he later extended the property to accommodate his relatives). He built a reservoir, and redirected the waterfall down the hills, adding a slate seat that faced the tumbling stream and craggy rocks rather than the lake, so that he could closely observe the fauna and flora of the hillside.


title: John Ruskin

text: Although Ruskin's 80th birthday was widely celebrated in 1899 (various Ruskin societies presenting him with an elaborately illuminated congratulatory address), Ruskin was scarcely aware of it. He died at Brantwood from influenza on 20 January 1900 at the age of 80. He was buried five days later in the churchyard at Coniston, according to his wishes. As he had grown weaker, suffering prolonged bouts of mental illness, he had been looked after by his second cousin, Joan(na) Severn (formerly "companion" to Ruskin's mother) and she and her family inherited his estate. "Joanna's Care" was the eloquent final chapter of Ruskin's memoir, which he dedicated to her as a fitting tribute.


title: John Ruskin

text: Joan Severn, together with Ruskin's secretary, W. G. Collingwood, and his eminent American friend Charles Eliot Norton, were executors to his will. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn edited the monumental 39-volume "Library Edition" of Ruskin's "Works", the last volume of which, an index, attempts to demonstrate the complex interconnectedness of Ruskin's thought. They all acted together to guard, and even control, Ruskin's public and personal reputation.


title: John Ruskin

text: The centenary of Ruskin's birth was keenly celebrated in 1919, but his reputation was already in decline and sank further in the fifty years that followed. The contents of Ruskin's home were dispersed in a series of sales at auction, and Brantwood itself was bought in 1932 by the educationist and Ruskin enthusiast, collector and memorialist, John Howard Whitehouse.


title: John Ruskin

text: Brantwood was opened in 1934 as a memorial to Ruskin and remains open to the public today. The Guild of St George continues to thrive as an educational charity, and has an international membership. The Ruskin Society organises events throughout the year.


title: John Ruskin

text: A series of public celebrations of Ruskin's multiple legacies took place in 2000, on the centenary of his death, and events are planned throughout 2019, to mark the bicentenary of his birth.


title: John Ruskin

text: In middle age, and at his prime as a lecturer, Ruskin was described as slim, perhaps a little short, with an aquiline nose and brilliant, piercing blue eyes. Often sporting a double-breasted waistcoat, a high collar and, when necessary, a frock coat, he also wore his trademark blue neckcloth. From 1878 he cultivated an increasingly long beard, and took on the appearance of an "Old Testament" prophet.


title: John Ruskin

text: The following description of Ruskin as a lecturer was written by an eyewitness, who was a student at the time (1884):


title: John Ruskin

text: An incident where the Arts and Crafts master William Morris had aroused the anger of Dr Bright, Master of University College, Oxford, served to demonstrate Ruskin's charisma:


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's influence reached across the world. Tolstoy described him as "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times" and quoted extensively from him, rendering his ideas into Russian. Proust not only admired Ruskin but helped translate his works into French. Gandhi wrote of the "magic spell" cast on him by "Unto This Last" and paraphrased the work in Gujarati, calling it "Sarvodaya", "The Advancement of All". In Japan, Ryuzo Mikimoto actively collaborated in Ruskin's translation. He commissioned sculptures and sundry commemorative items, and incorporated Ruskinian rose motifs in the jewellery produced by his cultured pearl empire. He established the Ruskin Society of Tokyo and his children built a dedicated library to house his Ruskin collection.


title: John Ruskin

text: A number of utopian socialist Ruskin Colonies attempted to put his political ideals into practice. These communities included Ruskin, Florida, Ruskin, British Columbia and the Ruskin Commonwealth Association, a colony in Dickson County, Tennessee in existence from 1894 to 1899.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's work has been translated into numerous languages including, in addition to those already mentioned (Russian, French, Japanese): German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Welsh, Esperanto, Gikuyu, and several Indian languages such as Kannada.


title: John Ruskin

text: Theorists and practitioners in a broad range of disciplines acknowledged their debt to Ruskin. Architects including Le Corbusier, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius incorporated his ideas in their work. Writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound felt Ruskin's influence. The American poet Marianne Moore was an enthusiastic Ruskin reader. Art historians and critics, among them Herbert Read, Roger Fry and Wilhelm Worringer, knew Ruskin's work well. Admirers ranged from the British-born American watercolourist and engraver John William Hill to the sculptor-designer, printmaker and utopianist Eric Gill. Aside from E. T. Cook, Ruskin's editor and biographer, other leading British journalists influenced by Ruskin include J. A. Spender, and the war correspondent H. W. Nevinson.


title: John Ruskin

text: William Morris and C. R. Ashbee (of the Guild of Handicraft) were keen disciples, and through them Ruskin's legacy can be traced in the arts and crafts movement. Ruskin's ideas on the preservation of open spaces and the conservation of historic buildings and places inspired his friends Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley to help found the National Trust.


title: John Ruskin

text: Pioneers of town planning such as Thomas Coglan Horsfall and Patrick Geddes called Ruskin an inspiration and invoked his ideas in justification of their own social interventions; likewise the founders of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.


title: John Ruskin

text: Edward Carpenter's community in Millthorpe, Derbyshire was partly inspired by Ruskin, and John Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh, Essex, which was briefly a refuge for the Doukhobors, combined Ruskin's ideas and Tolstoy's.


title: John Ruskin

text: The most prolific collector of Ruskiniana was John Howard Whitehouse, who saved Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and opened it as a permanent Ruskin memorial. Inspired by Ruskin's educational ideals, Whitehouse established Bembridge School, on the Isle of Wight, and ran it along Ruskinian lines. Educationists from William Jolly to Michael Ernest Sadler wrote about and appreciated Ruskin's ideas. Ruskin College, an educational establishment in Oxford originally intended for working men, was named after him by its American founders, Walter Vrooman and Charles A. Beard.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's innovative publishing experiment, conducted by his one-time Working Men's College pupil George Allen, whose business was eventually merged to become Allen & Unwin, anticipated the establishment of the Net Book Agreement.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's Drawing Collection, a collection of 1470 works of art he gathered as learning aids for the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (which he founded at Oxford), is at the Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has promoted Ruskin's art teaching, utilising the collection for in-person and online drawing courses.


title: John Ruskin

text: Pierre de Coubertin, the innovator of the modern Olympic Games, cited Ruskin's principles of beautification, asserting that the games should be "Ruskinised" to create an aesthetic identity that transcended mere championship competitions.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the future civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest MPs acknowledged Ruskin's influence than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. In Nazi Germany, Ruskin was seen as an early British National Socialist. William Montgomery McGovern's "From Luther to Hitler" (1941) identified Ruskin as a thinker who made Nazism possible, and one 1930s German headmaster told his students that "Carlyle and Ruskin were the first National Socialists." More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.


title: John Ruskin

text: In 2019, Ruskin200 was inaugurated as a year-long celebration marking the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth.


title: John Ruskin

text: Admirers and scholars of Ruskin can visit the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Ruskin's home, Brantwood, and the Ruskin Museum, both in Coniston in the English Lake District. All three mount regular exhibitions open to the public all the year round. Barony House in Edinburgh is home to a descendant of John Ruskin. She has designed and hand painted various friezes in honour of her ancestor and it is open to the public. Ruskin's Guild of St George continues his work today, in education, the arts, crafts, and the rural economy.


title: John Ruskin

text: Many streets, buildings, organisations and institutions bear his name: The Priory Ruskin Academy in Grantham, Lincolnshire; John Ruskin College, South Croydon; and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and Cambridge, which traces its origins to the Cambridge School of Art, at the foundation of which Ruskin spoke in 1858. Also, the Ruskin Literary and Debating Society, (founded in 1900 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), the oldest surviving club of its type, and still promoting the development of literary knowledge and public speaking today; and the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles, which still exists. In addition, there is the Ruskin Pottery, Ruskin House, Croydon and Ruskin Hall at the University of Pittsburgh.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin, Florida, United States—site of one of the short-lived American Ruskin Colleges—is named after John Ruskin. There is a mural of Ruskin titled "Head, Heart and Hands" on a building across from the Ruskin Post Office.


title: John Ruskin

text: Since 2000, scholarly research has focused on aspects of Ruskin's legacy, including his impact on the sciences; John Lubbock and Oliver Lodge admired him. Two major academic projects have looked at Ruskin and cultural tourism (investigating, for example, Ruskin's links with Thomas Cook); the other focuses on Ruskin and the theatre. The sociologist and media theorist David Gauntlett argues that Ruskin's notions of craft can be felt today in online communities such as YouTube and throughout Web 2.0. Similarly, architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek has argued that Ruskin's understanding of the Gothic as a combination of two types of variation, rough savageness and smooth changefulness, opens up a new way of thinking leading to digital and so-called parametric design.


title: John Ruskin

text: Notable Ruskin enthusiasts include the writers Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson, and the politicians Patrick Cormack, Frank Judd, Frank Field and Tony Benn. In 2006, Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, Raficq Abdulla, Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Wright were among those to contribute to the symposium, "There is no wealth but life: Ruskin in the 21st Century". Jonathan Glancey at "The Guardian" and Andrew Hill at the "Financial Times" have both written about Ruskin, as has the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. In 2015, inspired by Ruskin's philosophy of education, Marc Turtletaub founded "Meristem" in Fair Oaks, California. The centre educates adolescents with developmental differences using Ruskin's "land and craft" ideals, transitioning them so they will succeed as adults in an evolving post-industrial society.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin wrote over 250 works, initially art criticism and history, but expanding to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, cause certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that, "The anthologising of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts [... is] something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start." Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's early work defended the reputation of J. M. W. Turner. He believed that all great art should communicate an understanding and appreciation of nature. Accordingly, inherited artistic conventions should be rejected. Only by means of direct observation can an artist, through form and colour, represent nature in art. He advised artists in "Modern Painters" I to: "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing." By the 1850s. Ruskin was celebrating the Pre-Raphaelites, whose members, he said, had formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, this could not be revealed by mere display of skill, and must be an expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomise a reductive mechanisation of art.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in "The Stones of Venice" typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified." Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Attempts in the 19th century to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts he had helped inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.


title: John Ruskin

text: For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he criticised. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of "The Stones of Venice" (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced "faux" Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. The O'Shea brothers, freehand stone carvers chosen to revive the creative "freedom of thought" of Gothic craftsmen, disappointed him by their lack of reverence for the task.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works in which he attacked "laissez-faire" capitalism, which he thought was at its root. His ideas provided inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement, the founders of the National Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's views on art, wrote Kenneth Clark, "cannot be made to form a logical system, and perhaps owe to this fact a part of their value." Ruskin's accounts of art are descriptions of a superior type that conjure images vividly in the mind's eye.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration. He was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, promoted the latter. In "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", (1849) Ruskin wrote:


title: John Ruskin

text: This abhorrence of restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time."


title: John Ruskin

text: For Ruskin, the "age" of a building was crucially significant as an aspect in its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin wielded a critique of political economy of orthodox, 19th-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in "The Stones of Venice", and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as "The Political Economy of Art" ("A Joy for Ever"), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, "Unto This Last".


title: John Ruskin

text: At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in "The Wealth of Nations" had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See "The Stones of Venice" above.)


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.


title: John Ruskin

text: In the preface to "Unto This Last" (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame. Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.


title: John Ruskin

text: Until 2005, biographies of both J. M. W. Turner and Ruskin had claimed that in 1858 Ruskin burned bundles of erotic paintings and drawings by Turner to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was Keeper of the National Gallery, was said to have colluded in the alleged destruction of Turner's works. In 2005, these works, which form part of the Turner Bequest held at Tate Britain, were re-appraised by Turner Curator Ian Warrell, who concluded that Ruskin and Wornum had not destroyed them.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's sexuality has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and critical comment. His one marriage, to Effie Gray, was annulled after six years owing to non-consummation. Effie, in a letter to her parents, claimed that Ruskin found her "person" repugnant: He alleged various reasons, hatred of children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848]. Ruskin told his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it. The cause of Ruskin's "disgust" has led to much conjecture. Mary Lutyens speculated that he rejected Effie because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of nudes which lacked pubic hair. However, Peter Fuller wrote, "It has been said that he was frightened on the wedding night by the sight of his wife's pubic hair; more probably, he was perturbed by her menstrual blood." Ruskin's biographers Tim Hilton and John Batchelor also took the view that menstruation was the more likely explanation, though Batchelor also suggests that body-odour may have been the problem. There is no evidence to support any of these theories. William Ewart Gladstone said to his daughter Mary, "should you ever hear anyone blame Millais or his wife, or Mr. Ruskin [for the breakdown of the marriage], remember that there is no fault; there was misfortune, even tragedy. All three were perfectly blameless." The fullest story of the Ruskins' marriage to date has been told by the scholar Robert Brownell.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin's later relationship with Rose La Touche has led to claims that he started a correspondence with her when he met her at the age of nine. In fact, he did not approach her as a suitor until on or near her eighteenth birthday. She asked him to wait for her until she was 21. Receiving no answer, he repeated his proposal.


title: John Ruskin

text: Ruskin is not known to have had any sexually intimate relationships. During an episode of mental derangement after Rose died, he wrote a letter in which he insisted that Rose's spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting him at the time. It is also true that in letters from Ruskin to Kate Greenaway he asked her to draw her "girlies" (as he called her child figures) without clothing:


title: John Ruskin

text: Will you – (it's all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.


title: John Ruskin

text: I like my girls from ten to sixteen—allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they're not in love with anybody but me.—I've got some darlings of 8—12—14—just now, and my Pigwiggina here—12—who fetches my wood and is learning to play my bells.