Authors

British · 1819–1900

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the most influential English art critic of the nineteenth century and a major social thinker, whose Modern Painters (1843-1860), The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), and the social essays Unto This Last (1860) shaped Victorian taste in art and architecture and influenced Gandhi, Tolstoy, and William Morris. He was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. His private life was marked by a famous unconsummated marriage, a passionate attachment to a nine-year-old girl that he pursued for decades, and eventual mental breakdown.