Dzhon Reskin

John Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, into the family of a wealthy Scottish sherry merchant, D. J. Ruskin. His grandfather, John Thomas Ruskin, was a businessman who traded in calico. The family was imbued with an atmosphere of religious piety, which had a significant influence on the writer’s later views. Even in his youth he traveled extensively, and his travel diaries always included notes on the geological formations in the landscapes of the countries he visited. He entered Oxford University and later taught a course in art history there himself. As a lecturer, he insisted that future landscape painters should study geology and biology, and that the practice of scientific drawing should be introduced: “On fine days I devote a little time to painstaking study of nature; in bad weather I take a leaf or a plant as my basis and draw it. This inevitably leads me to determine its botanical name.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900), English writer, art historian, and advocate of social reform. He was born on February 8, 1819, in London. Ruskin’s parents were D. J. Ruskin, one of the co-owners of a sherry-importing firm, and Margaret Cock, his cousin. John grew up in an atmosphere of evangelical piety. However, his father loved art, and when the boy was 13, the family traveled extensively through France, Belgium, Germany, and especially Switzerland. Ruskin studied drawing with the English artists Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding and became a skilled draftsman. He depicted mainly architectural subjects, admiring Gothic architecture in particular.

In 1836 Ruskin entered Christ Church, Oxford University, where he studied geology under W. Buckland. At the age of 21, his father gave him a generous allowance, and they both began collecting paintings by J. Turner (1775–1851). In 1839 Ruskin was awarded the Newdigate Prize for the best poem in English; however, in the spring of 1840 his studies at Oxford were interrupted by illness: he began to bleed, which doctors regarded as a symptom of tuberculosis.

In 1841 Ruskin began expanding the essay he had written at seventeen in defense of Turner’s painting. The result was the five-volume work Modern Painters, the first volume of which appeared