Late Ruskin: New Contexts

Late Ruskin: New Contexts
Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351791338

This title was first published in 2001. Ruskin said that 1860 marked the beginning of his 'proper work'. This study presents new, historicized readings of important texts and themes from that late period, 1860-1889, discussing in detail works including Unto this Last (1860), the Lectures on Art (1870), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), and The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), and considering key themes such as Ruskin's politicized regard for Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1870s, and the complex topic of Ruskin and manliness. Claiming new and distinctive importance for this period of Ruskin's work, both in terms of Ruskin's development as a writer and his place in Victorian culture as it moved toward modernity, this book is the first solely devoted to the prolific later years, and draws on much unpublished material.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin
Author: James S. Dearden
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781841270456

Despite professing a dislike of having his portrait taken, John Ruskin's footsteps were dogged by portrait painters, sculptors, caricaturists and photographers from the cradle to the grave and beyond. A thoroughly accessible book it lists and describes some 331likenesses made between 1822 and 1998. The three introductory chapters to this book survey Ruskin portraiture and the portraits, his general physical appearance througout his life, his hands, his mouth, his various illnesses and their effect on his appearance, his clothes, style of dress, size, tailors, their bills, etc. These opening chapters include many descriptions and reminiscences by Ruskin's friends and acquaintances, and those who portrayed him. The principal part of the book deals with the individual portraits, their history, where and why they were made, what Ruskin was doing at that time of his life and what his connection was with the artists in question. He was portrayed so regularly that this section is also effectively a potted Ruskin biography, based on the portraits. A 'catalogue raisonne' of the Ruskin portraits follows where the physical details of the works are listed, together with details of reproductions, exhibitions and provenance.

John Ruskin's Politics and Natural Law

John Ruskin's Politics and Natural Law
Author: Graham A. MacDonald
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2018-02-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319722816

This book offers new perspectives on the origins and development of John Ruskin’s political thought. Graham A. MacDonald traces the influence of late medieval and pre-Enlightenment thought in Ruskin’s writing, reintroducing readers to Ruskin’s politics as shaped through his engagement with concepts of natural law, legal rights, labour and welfare organization. From Ruskin’s youthful studies of geology and chemistry to his back-to-the-land project, the Guild of St. George, he emerges as a complex political thinker, a reformer—and what we would recognize today as an environmentalist. John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law is a nuanced reappraisal of neglected areas of Ruskin’s thought.

The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George

The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George
Author: Mark Frost
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783082836

This important work in Ruskin studies provides for the first time an authoritative study of Ruskin’s Guild of St George. It introduces new material that is important in its own right as a significant piece of social history, and as a means to re-examine Ruskin’s Guild idea of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, creativity and environmental sustainability. The remarkable story of William Graham and other Companions lost to Guild history provides a means to fundamentally transform our understanding of Ruskin’s utopianism.

John Ruskin and Switzerland

John Ruskin and Switzerland
Author: John Hayman
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0889207852

An authoritative work interspersed with nearly one hundred of John Ruskin’s Swiss drawings recounts his lifelong interest in Switzerland. Hayman provides a chronological account of Ruskin’s visits to Switzerland from his earliest travels in 1833 and 1835 and his frequent tours of the 1840s to the final visits in the 1880s. Of particular concern is Ruskin’s intention between approximately 1855 and 1865 to engrave his own drawings of Swiss towns for a work illustrative of Swiss history. Drawings of the historic Swiss towns in which Ruskin was most interested — Baden, Bellinzona, Brugg, Fribourg, Geneva, Laufenburg, Lucerne, Neuchâtel, Rheinfelden, Schaffhausen, and Thun — are introduced by excerpts from John Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1856). Hayman has traced a great many Swiss drawings Ruskin referred to in his letters and diaries and has located twenty-three previously unpublished ones which appear in his book. Ruskin’s well-documented defence of J.M.W. Turner is also brought to light as the author has juxtaposed reproductions of Turner’s sketches of Swiss towns with drawings by Ruskin. This work will not only interest scholars and students of Ruskin but should also pique the interest of Turner scholars.

Louisa Waterford and John Ruskin

Louisa Waterford and John Ruskin
Author: Caroline Ings-Chambers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1351559699

Louisa Waterford (1818-91), modest, retiring, of good family, renowned for her beauty, and with extraordinary grace, was the embodiment of a Victorian ideal of womanhood. But like the age itself, her life was filled with contrasts and paradoxes. She had been born with artistic gifts, and became a satellite of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though she had no formal training. Then, at the height of John Ruskin's intellectual power and success as a critic, she asked him to accept her as an art student, and he accepted. Their correspondence- often harshly critical, never, as Waterford put it, falsely praising - lies at the heart of this book. These are letters which open a spectrum of discussion on the cultural, gender and social issues of the period. Both Waterford and Ruskin engaged in tireless philanthropic work for diverse causes, crossing social boundaries with subtle determination, and both responded to a sense of duty as well as an artistic vocation. But, as Ings-Chambers shows, their correspondence was more than a dialogue about society: it helped to make Waterford the artist she became.

Ruskin's Culture Wars

Ruskin's Culture Wars
Author: Judith Stoddart
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1998
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780813918068

In Ruskin's Culture Wars, Judith Stoddart provides the first sustained modern critical reading of Fors Clavigera, placing this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries: art journals, liberal and working-class periodicals, and popular criticism. In recreating the intellectual climate, she demonstrates the sense of cultural crisis and change evident at the time. Rebelling against the tendency to treat Ruskin's letters as the prose lyric of a damaged psyche, Stoddart shows how the cumulative text of Fors Clavigera not only records but revises and redirects the preoccupations of his period. He was an integral part of Victorian discussions of literary tradition and of the roles of democracy and nationality in late-nineteenth-century Europe.

Persistent Ruskin

Persistent Ruskin
Author: Keith Hanley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317082087

Examining the wide-ranging implications of Ruskin's engagement with his contemporaries and followers, this collection is organized around three related themes: Ruskin's intellectual legacy and the extent to which its address to working men and women and children was realised in practice; Ruskin's followers and their sites of influence, especially those related to the formation of collections, museums, archives and galleries representing values and ideas associated with Ruskin; and the extent to which Ruskin's work constructed a world-wide network of followers, movements and social gestures that acknowledge his authority and influence. As the introduction shows, Ruskin's continuing digital presence is striking and makes a case for Ruskin's persistent presence. The collection begins with essays on Ruskin's intellectual presence in nineteenth-century thought, with some emphasis on his interest in the education of women. This section is followed by one on Ruskin's followers from the mid-nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism that looks at a broad range of cultural activities that sought to further, repudiate, or exemplify Ruskin's work and teaching. Working-class education, the Ruskinian periodical, plays, and science fiction are all considered along with the Bloomsbury Group's engagement with Ruskin's thought and writing. Essays on Ruskin abroad-in America, Australia, and India round out the collection.

Ruskin's Artists

Ruskin's Artists
Author: Robert Hewison
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351788337

This was first published in 2000: A study of John Ruskin's engagement with art and architecture as a critic, a patron and a teacher. It offers insights into both his writings and the visual economy of the Victorian world. Each essay examines Ruskin's relationship with an individual artist or a distinct aspect of art practice. J.M.W. Turner, D.G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt and E. Burne-Jones are among those artists discussed whose personal relationships with Ruskin affected his critical writing. Ruskin's attitude to women artists and his approach to the teaching of art are given special attention.