Modern Painters by John Ruskin

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1843-1860

Type of work: Art history and criticism

The Work

Modern Painters is the work that gained for Ruskin the recognition of the English world of letters and creativity. Published in 1843, when Ruskin was twenty-four, it represents the young Oxford graduate’s defense of his spiritual and intellectual mentor, J. M. W. Turner, the great English Romantic landscape painter, against the adversarial criticisms of the British intellectual press. Although Turner was an associate of the Royal Academy of Art, he was principally noted for his illustrations of such famous British authors as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. The work goes far beyond Ruskin’s expressed aim, however, as it expresses in its earliest and most seminal form the author’s philosophy of art and his most profound spiritual and moral philosophies of life. This philosophy is, perhaps, best expressed in his perception that the appreciation and ability to transform such appreciation into full-blown artistic fruition depends upon a physical sensibility that can aesthetically and truthfully evaluate the physical attributes of beauty and truth and transform them, honestly, upon canvas into a higher expression of the spiritual significance of the natural.

Of all the ideas that art seeks to communicate, Ruskin states—ideas of imitation, of relation, of power, of beauty, and of truth—ideas of truth are of the highest value. Truth, however, is not necessarily easily perceived or, indeed, necessarily perceived at first glance. Thus, when a painting appears to deviate from the representational, it does not necessarily deviate from the truth. Similarly, in art, all truths do not necessarily have the same importance. Thus, for the great artist, only rare and particular truths are worth transmitting. This transmission, moreover, must be accompanied by a true love of subject; otherwise, the artist will in no way surpass the product of a superior photographer. Truth transcends mere representation.

Ruskin then goes on to demonstrate with painstaking detail that with regard to truth of comprehension and passion of execution of all modern painters, Turner is without peer. Indeed, Ruskin states with passionate conviction, “In every new insight which we obtain into the works of God, in every new idea which we receive from his creation, we shall find ourselves possessed of an interpretation and a guide to something in Turner’s work which we had not understood before.”

The second volume of Modern Painters focuses upon the definition and interpretation of the physical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects and impact of the Beautiful. Stylistically, it is the most Romantic in intensity and outlook of all Ruskin’s writing. For him, art represents the summary of all human endeavor—the apex of all that is humanly achievable. As he sees it, poets and mystics have always expressed the inseparable emotions of gratitude and wonder that come from a heightened perception of the natural world—and it is these emotions, in one form or another, that true art always seeks to express. Thus, he sees the deliberate pursuit and contemplation of beauty as humanity’s noblest gift, employing the highest faculties and spiritual, as well as moral, endowments of which humanity is capable.

Ruskin then goes on to distinguish between the theoretical faculty employed in the contemplation of the Beautiful and the aesthetic faculty, which he interprets as that which merely perceives and interprets the natural world by means of the senses. The latter, when working alone, is entirely objective. When combined with the theoretical faculty, however, and including the wholly positive and wholly human qualities of joy, admiration, love, and gratitude, it welds to form the necessary genius and desire to inspire and create art.

To achieve the theoretical state whereby one can appreciate the natural world and interpret it through the creation of inspired works of art demands, Ruskin submits, discipline, earnestness, love, and selflessness. In this happy combination arises the creation of true and lasting taste. Such a state, however, he elaborates,

cannot be cramped in its conclusions by partialities and hypocrisies: its visions and its delights are too penetrating, too living, for any whitewashed object or shallow fountain long to endure or supply. It clasps all that it loves so hard, that it crushes it if it be hollow.

This precept is followed by an analysis of the multiple aspects of Beauty and Ruskin’s proposition that great art is concerned with either the direct representation or the imaginative metamorphosis of Truth, while bad art is neither truly imaginative nor even accurate in its representation of Nature. He goes on to spell out the intellectual and spiritual attributes necessary for identifying Truth and for distinguishing what is true from what is false. True taste, he submits, pierces to the Truth and finds Beauty everywhere. Beauty, he posits, can be “felt and found in every human heart and countenance,—to be loved in every roadside weed and moss-grown wall.”

Volumes 3, 4, and 5 of Modern Painters were published between 1854 and 1860 and continue Ruskin’s literary and critical monument to Turner’s eminence, even as they identify the criteria—the philosophical and intellectual foundations—for Ruskin’s aesthetic theory.

In volume 3, he defines the laws that govern painting. To be skilled in the evaluation of a work of art requires the kind of study and discipline necessary to embark upon the theory and practice of science. A responsible critic must be familiar with the history and sociological periods of the era of the artist whose work he or she judges. Critics must, as well, be familiar with the religious and spiritual attributes of the age in question, careful, scientific observers of Nature, and conversant with such sciences as optics, physics, botany, geology, geometry, and anatomy. What this volume gives Ruskin the opportunity of doing is to display the remarkable qualifications that he himself possesses with respect to such criteria. Ruskin at the same time reveals his own great literary skills, which approach in their fervor the kind of Romantic zeal and love of nature that one encounters in the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. This passion he sustains throughout the ensuing works, where his attention falls upon the assessment of those other painters who fall short of, or approach, his beloved Turner in their greatness.

Bibliography

Bell, Quentin. Ruskin. New York: George Braziller, 1978.

Cianci, Giovanni, and Peter Nicholls, eds. Ruskin and Modernism. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Craig, David M. John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Daley, Kenneth. The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001.

Hanson, Brian. Architects and the “Building World” from Chambers to Ruskin: Constructing Authority. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hunt, John Dixon. The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Leon, Derrick. Ruskin: The Great Victorian. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.