John Ruskin wrote art criticism, social commentary, travel prose and lectures that connect visual attention with moral and economic questions. Modern Painters begins as a defence of J. M. W. Turner but expands into a wide-ranging study of landscape, perception and the aims of art. The Stones of Venice examines Venetian architecture alongside arguments about labour, craft and social organisation, while Unto This Last attacks assumptions of classical political economy and asks what wealth means when separated from human wellbeing. Ruskin's prose can be richly descriptive and rhetorically forceful, moving quickly from a building, painting or cloud to a moral claim about society. His work fits Victorian art criticism, architecture, social thought and nature writing. Readers of William Morris and later Arts and Crafts writing will find many of Ruskin's concerns about labour and design carried forward. Read more Less
No products in the cart.