John Ruskin
1819-1900

Ruskin was an English writer, art critic and reformer, best known for his studies of architecture and its social and historical implications.

Ruskin was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. His father, a wealthy merchant, encouraged his youthful passions for art, literature, and travel. He set forth his theory about the relationship between art and morality in the first volume of Modern Painters. This work was in part a defense of the then-controversial painter J. M. W. Turner. The two books that followed, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), were studies in the religious, moral, economic, and political significance of domestic architecture. Rebelling against the aesthetically numbing and socially debasing effects of the Industrial Revolution, he put forth the theory that art, which is essentially spiritual, reached its zenith in the Gothic art of the late Middle Ages, which was inspired by religious and moral zeal.

Ruskin believed that individual craftsmen produced the most beautiful and unique work. These craftsman, if given the freedom to design, were capable of producing beautiful works of art befitting religious structures.

"We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, as we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense."

John Ruskin