1819-1900 English academic and critic, who had an enormous influence not only on architectural style but on the ways in which standards of aesthetics were judged. He used an Evangelical and polemical tone in his writings that not only reached a mass audience but received the approval of the Ecclesiologists. Initially encouraged by J. C. Loudon, he contributed to some of Loudon's publications, but his key works date from the late 1840s and 1850s. The Gothic Revival was well established when Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), which was an immediate success, encapsulating the mood of the period rather than creating new ideas. He argued that architecture should be true, with no hidden structure, no veneers or finishes, and no carvings made by machines, and that Beauty in architecture was only possible if inspired by nature. As exemplars worthy of imitation (he argued that the styles known to Man were quite sufficient, and that no new style was necessary) he selected Pisan Romanesque, early Gothic of Western Italy, Venetian Gothic, and English early Second Pointed as his paradigms. In the choice of the last, the style of the late C13 and early C14, he was echoing A. W. N. Pugin's preferences as well as that of most ecclesiologically minded Gothic Revivalists such as G. G. Scott. The Stones of Venice (1851C3) helped to promote that phase of the Gothic Revival in which Continental (especially Venetian) Gothic predominated. Deane and Woodward's University Museum, Oxford (1854C60), is an example of Venetian or Ruskinian Gothic. In particular, structural polychromy, featuring colour in the material used, rather than applied, was popularized by Ruskin's writings.   Related Paintings of John Ruskin,HRWS :. | Banquet I | Herodias' Revenge | Adoration of the Magi | Self-Portrait | The Arrival of the Diligence |
Related Artists:
Mark Gertler
British 1891-1939 Mark Gertler Gallery English painter. He was the son of Polish Jews and was brought up in Whitechapel in severe poverty until his father furrier workshop became moderately successful. As a child he knew nothing of art except advertisements and the work of pavement artists. He was 14 before he heard of any art institutions, and his career was determined by the discovery of W. P. Frith Autobiography in a secondhand bookshop. In 1906 he began attending art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, as well as a series of talks on Dutch and Flemish painting. His earliest still-lifes show the influence of Dutch 17th-century painting and the work of Chardin. Gertler left the Polytechnic for financial reasons in 1907 and apprenticed himself to Clayton and Bell, a firm of glass painters. In 1908 he won a prize in a national art competition and, on the strength of this, successfully applied for financial assistance from the Jewish Educational Aid Society, using William Rothenstein as a referee. That autumn he entered the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was taught by Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer. He won several prizes and scholarships and fell in love with Dora Carrington. This and other friendships established at the Slade introduced him into a society that gave him a new perspective on his own family background. While writing delightedly to others of his nice friends among the upper classes, his paintings
Valentin Serov
Russian Impressionist Painter, 1865-1911
Edward Ashton Goodes
b.1832 d.1910