John Ruskin And The Victorian Eye

Susan Phelps Gordon, Curator of European Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, relates Ruskin's critical reaction to the art of his time, including the infamous Whistler vs. Ruskin libel trial of 1878 as well as Ruskin's relationships with and aspirations for the artists he supported. Anthony Lacy Gully, Associate Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, explores Ruskin's fascination with the natural world and his clashes with the scientific community. Susan P. Casteras, Curator of Paintings at the Yale Center for British Art and a lecturer in art history at Yale College, looks at Ruskin's theories on museums and their installations as he applied them in his Saint George's Museum, which he founded for the education of the miners of Sheffield

This "tour de force of analysis" (Joel Agee) examines the life and work of the prolific, visionary writer, painter and critic. Kemp finds in Ruskin's life -- which spanned the same years as Queen Victoria's and thus embodied the Victorian era itself -- a faithful mirror of the history and psychological evolution of his age.

Rather than focusing on German philosophy or the French avant-gardes, as many books on the history of aesthetics do, Teukolsky takes up British responses to modern art controversies, thus providing a unique view on the development of artistic forms and art history. She considers the canonical writing of authors like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture--gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, advertisements, and early photography monographs among them. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument also adds substance to our understanding of the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention given to the historical particularities and real events that stamped their imprint on such interactions.

This volume powerfully demonstrates the range and inexhaustible vitality of Ruskin's prose and will once again become an indispensable reference for Victorianists from a range of disciplines.

This book, first published in 1949, is an important work in Victorian studies, and directs light on Ruskin’s personal tragedy, his public life, and on the character of his work. This book will be of interest to students of history and cultural studies.

From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have sought to demonstrate how a life without constant growth might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sustainability has been largely forgotten. "Green Victorians" recovers the story of a small circle of men and women led by political economist and art critic John Ruskin. "Green Victorians" explores how Ruskin s most enthusiastic followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from painting, hand-weaving, and wood-working to gardening, archaeology, story-telling, and children s education. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for while those in Ruskin s experimental community established a thriving handicraft industry and protected the Lake District from over-development, they paid a price. Richly illustrated, "Green Victorians" breaks new ground by connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin s utopian community to the problems of ethical consumption then and now. "

Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume analyses the impact John Ruskin has had on architecture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores Ruskin’s different ideologies, such as the adorned wall veil, which were instrumental in bringing focus to structures that were previously unconsidered. John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture examines the ways in which Ruskin perceives the evolution of architecture through the idea that architecture is surface. The creative act in architecture, analogous to the divine act of creation, was viewed as a form of dressing. By adding highly aesthetic features to designs, taking inspiration from the 'veil' of women’s clothing, Ruskin believed that buildings could be transformed into meaningful architecture. This volume discusses the importance of Ruskin’s surface theory and the myth of feminine architecture, and additionally presents a competing theory of textile analogy in architecture based on morality and gender to counter Gottfried Semper’s historicist perspective. This book would be beneficial to students and academics of architectural history and theory, gender studies and visual studies who wish to delve into Ruskin’s theories and to further understand his capacity for thinking beyond the historical methods. The book will also be of interest to architectural practitioners, particularly Ruskin’s theory of surface architecture.

In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their creativity and establish themselves as authors. Their object was to manage, rather than to indulge or repress, their emotions for the purposes of perfecting their observational and critical skills. Reading these diaries as literary works in their own right, Millim analyses their crucial role in the construction of authorship. By relating these Victorian writers' diaries to their publications and to contemporary works of cultural criticism, Millim shows the multifarious ways in which diaristic practices, emotional management and professional output corresponded to experiences of the literary marketplace and to nineteenth-century codes of propriety.

This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre', an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression.