Clive Aslet reflects on the art critic’s attitude to aesthetics and the legacy of his radical views today, the subject of a new exhibition celebrating his bicentenary.
JOHN RUSKIN knew how to hate. His list of allbut-unendurable objects includes iron railings, the Houses of Parliament, lawyers, money-making, railways and their stations, cycling, the English Constitution, King’s College Chapel and The Hunch-back of Notre-Dame.
‘Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboonblooded stuff,’ Wagner’s Meistersingers beat everything he had seen on stage. ‘I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember, in my life, by the stopping of any sound—not excepting railroad whistles—as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing.’ It’s unlikely that Mrs Burne- Jones, to whom the letter was addressed, mistook it for praise.
However, he was equally extreme in his enthusiasms. Turner was one—‘the greatest of the age… in every faculty of the imagination’. After a pampered if restricted childhood, Ruskin wanted to share his loves with the rest of the world.
Arriving in Venice for his honeymoon in 1848, the Year of Revolutions, he feared that the resumption of Austrian control would lead to destruction. Consequently, he began a campaign to record precious and vulnerable details.
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