More than Just an Art Critic

John Ruskin. He is usually identified as being an "art critic," such as in this typical entry from a dictionary:  "Ruskin, John. 1819-1900. British writer and art critic who considered a great painting to be one that conveys great ideas to the viewer.  His works include Modern Painters (1843-1860)."

John Ruskin,
self-portrait, 1861

But Ruskin thought about much more than art.  He even reflected deeply upon intellectual issues related to religion during the 19th century, during which he lived. It was a rapidly-changing, confusing time to many people in England.

The emergence of historically-oriented academic fields such as geology and paleontology had raised questions about the Bible's truth, which was being approached with a new, historical mindset (rather than symbolically or spiritually, as had been traditional).  Those sciences were revealing the Earth's age to be vastly older than traditionally imagined.  Ruskin confessed to a friend:

"If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them
                                                 at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

For the first couple centuries after the rise of modern science in the 1600's, it had been hoped that scientific discoveries about the natural world would add new, overwhelming evidence to how Nature had been designed by a good, benevolent Creator.  But Ruskin was aware of the drawbacks in that approach because of the ambiguity of Nature.  Calling upon readers to view the natural world with a keen eye (the way they might examine a painting), he first lays out an idyllic scene:

"It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern.... The autumn sun, low but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them,
 rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock."

But then, his camera-like eye pans slightly to the right:

"Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcase [carcass] of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through
 the skin, raven-torn."

Ruskin (writing even before the after-effects of Darwin's Origin of Species) forces us to see the disturbing ambiguity of Nature: That which was death to the ewe is life to the ravens.

Despite Nature's not being able to be a straightforward moral guide to us, Ruskin does not think we should lose the compassionate capabilities of the human heart -- as demonstrated by the sympathetic manner in which he describes the next things his observant eye falls upon:

"I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog -- a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe's."                                                                 

These passages show how Ruskin viewed the face of Nature as being illuminative and yet turbulent.  Those qualities of Nature are also expressed in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, which Ruskin greatly admired.

~ ~ ~ 

(Is there a way you view the presence of disturbing features in Nature and yet still derive inspiration from it?)

(The dictionary entry is from The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, © 1992.)
(Ruskin's statement about Bible verses was made in his letter of May 24, 1851 to Henry Acland.)
(Ruskin's descriptions of scenes in the natural world are from the 1860 edition of his Modern Painters, )