Modern Painters: Part 3

by John Ruskin

The influence of John Ruskin (1819-1900), both on his own time and on artistic and social developments in the twentieth century, cannot be over-stated. He changed Victorian perceptions of art, and was the main influence behind 'Gothic revival' architecture. As a social critic, he argued for the improvement of the condition of the poor, and against the increasing mechanisation of work in factories, which he believed was dull and soul-destroying. The thirty-nine volumes of the Library Edition of his works, published between 1903 and 1912, are themselves a remarkable achievement, in which his books and essays - almost all highly illustrated - are given a biographical and critical context in extended introductory essays and in the 'Minor Ruskiniana' - extracts from letters, articles and reminiscences both by and about Ruskin. This fifth volume contains Volume 3 of Modern Painters.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Victorian

Unbound

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, 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.
Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris, notably Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary, which he considered as "the only book of any value on architecture". 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.
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.
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.

Reviews

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

In volume three of Modern Painters, John Ruskin continues his examination of aesthetics in the visual arts, specifically painting, but he does mention architecture. Sculpture does get a mention here and there. One feels that the form might just be a tad too overtly three-dimensional for the great man.

Ruskin, apparently, knows what he thinks. Maybe he thinks that he knows something. He certainly knows what he likes or more likely, he likes what he knows. But he does champion the work of at least one contemporary painter, Turner. He also champions, the writing of a contemporary poet and novelist, Sir Walter Scott. Turner has endured. Scott…? Does anyone reading Scott nowadays do so without the dismissive smirk? Ruskin almost apologises. “I think it’s probable that many readers may be surprised at my calling Scott, the great representative of the mind of the age in literature…”

Scott, for Ruskin, regularly referred to colour, shades of colour, and to aspects of natural history that Ruskin thought embodied the true nature of ‘seeing’. This act, this facility, however, did not happen in industrial cities, only in leafy glades, in forests, in rural settings, in moorland, close to mountains, when confronted by expanses of water, running or waive-topped. All of these are far from the already industrialised society which generated the wealth he apparently took for granted.

Ruskin examines again, as in volume two, different aspects of what painters have always tried to depict. He still finds fiction in Claude and truth in Turner, the truth always relating to faithfulness to God’s creation. “We cannot say that a painter is great, because he paints boldly, or paints delicately; because he generalizes or particular; because he loves detail, or because he disdains it. He is great if, by any of these means, he has laid open, noble truths, or aroused noble emotions.” Precisely what constitutes nobility, or indeed its absence, is open to question. Ruskin seems to know, however, by virtue of his being born into that special class of human beings. “We have, among mankind, in general, three orders of being; the lowest, sordid and selfish, which neither sees, nor feels; the second, noble and sympathetic, but which sees, and feels, without concluding or acting; the third and highest, which loses sight in resolution, and feeling in work.” Let’s guess which class of being Ruskin thought himself to a member of.

But there are elements of confusion. He seems to deny imagination when it becomes pure invention. But he, it appears, lives in a world where both angels and centaurs exist. People have the right to paint angels, but “They ought on the canvas to look like real angels…” Centaurs wander in and out of people’s thoughts and thus become real. “But the real living centaur actually trotted across Dante’s brain, and he saw him do it.” Other people painted or described centaurs, but not as successfully as Dante. One wonders whether these are merely received opinions?

He also lives in a world where to be English and Christian is to occupy the summit of God’s creation. Apparently, only English windows fit. This sense of superiority is related to the idea of progress, which is also linked to science and discovery. But when this science, results in factory production and mechanization, he rejects it. Knowledge, it seems, is laudable, but technology is not. Rest assured, however, that the English occupy the summit in everything, especially when compared with “…the Chinese and Indians, and other semi-civilized nations…”

Try as he might to create a rationale by which visual images might be judged and interpreted, Ruskin eventually seems to become trapped in a reverence for his own identity. In the end, when we exercise aesthetic judgment, all of us approach the process with our internal bigotry and presumptions. Only when something conforms to what we expect do we seem to recognize achievement, and I suggest Ruskin was no different.

Opinion about art, for him, seems to be limited to those who might deserve to hold it. “The moment any man begins to talk about rules, in whatsoever art, you may know him for a second rate man, and, if he talks about them much, he is a third rate, or not an artist at all.” And anyone who has an opinion is likely to be judged. “While all the men whom I know, who cannot paint, are ready with admirable reasons for everything they have done; and can show in the most conclusive way, that Turner is wrong, and how he might be improved.”

Artists are created by God and God alone. “…greatness in art… is not a teachable, nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God…” Like all critics, John Ruskin knows what he likes. He likes what he knows and perhaps what he has been taught to like.

‘I liked it’ is a thoroughly complex position.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished the very disappointing second volume of Modern Painters last April (see my review), and it has taken me about ten months to get back to the third volume; but it took Ruskin ten years to get back to writing it, so I guess I didn’t do so bad. This is a much better book; Ruskin is a more mature writer, and is writing in simple (for him) English rather than the affected prose imitating Hooker. While still religious in essence, it is less dogmatically Protestant than the previous volumes, or the intervening The Stones of Venice (also see my review).

The book is less rigidly organized into sections and subsections than the first two volumes. It divides roughly into two parts; the first half investigates what makes a painting (or a poem or work of literature) “high art” or noble, and the second part is a history of landscape in literature and art, in the classical, mediaeval, and modern periods. When he is not talking about God, there is much that is interesting and useful in his discussions, and this volume is probably worth reading for anyone interested in aesthetic philosophy or practical criticism of painting. The book ends on a rather jarring note, with a digression supporting the Crimean War. There are five appendices, three by Ruskin and two added by the editors with additional matter from the manuscripts.