John Ruskin--the Preferred Critic of Woodworkers Since 1819

It is hard to overstate John Ruskin's impact on art, and the more i read about him, the more i am convinced that this post will not do justice to the man who, according to Charlotte Bronte, taught an entire generation how to see. His proteges included John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris. His writings on political economy were also not bad. Cecil Rhodes and Tolstoy were fans. Gandhi had something of a conversion experience whilst reading Ruskin's Unto This Last on a train from Johannesburg to Durban. According to a survey of the first Parliament in which Labour managed to get seats, that very book had more of an impact on the Labour Party members than Das Kapital. 

Ruskin aspired to write like Richard Hooker and George Herbert. Volume II of his Modern Painters (1846) is consciously styled after Hooker's Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. Ruskin invokes Hooker for his conception of moderation as beauty: 

He also seems to draw heavily on Hooker in his discussion of unity amid variety, or what Hooker would call 'harmonious dissimilitude', and in his discussion of the delight of creating, Ruskin also borrows from Book V of Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. For an awesome article about Anglicanism and art, click here. 

Ruskin's influence is as durable as it is expansive; he's  a particular favourite amongst woodworkers in our time. One of my favourite blogs, Chris Hall's 'The Carpentry Way', which is about eastern and western woodworking, refers to Ruskin numerous times in his series 'The Master Builder Tradition-What Happened?'. Evan Adams is quite forthcoming about Ruskin quotes being one of the main features of his fantastic blog, and Brad at treefrogfurniture explains the evolution of Dutch Arts and Crafts in the United States! By and large, it seems that Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849),which you can read here, is the most popular amongst woodworkers.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture was published in May 1849, the first of Ruskin's works to carry his name, and the first to be illustrated, with fourteen plates drawn and etched by him. A reference in the preface to the depredations of 'the Restorer, or Revolutionist' made Ruskin's position clear. He wished to protect what survived, and draw from it certain principles which would influence the direction of the Gothic revival, notably towards the use of Gothic in secular buildings. His purpose was both to secularize and make protestant the movement, drawing it away from the Roman Catholic influence of Augustus Welby Pugin. His intervention was theoretical rather than practical: the 'lamps' of architecture were moral categories-sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience. Like the types of typical beauty in Modern Painters, volume 2, they are abstract notions in themselves, but for Ruskin were manifested in particular Gothic buildings in Italy and northern France. (ODNB)

Whilst in Oxford, he had been acquainted with many giants of the literary and artistic scene:

Ruskin recruited Wilde into a group of social activists trying to build a road, and his anger at social cruelty found fallow soil in the boy from the famine-writers' house. Pater and Ruskin shaped Wilde's thought and its expression: they did not originate it. Initially he brought their ideas and his glosses into the market place in lectures on aesthetics in the UK and the USA. Thereafter he embedded them, begirt in his own wit and charm, in fictions such as The Happy Prince and other Tales and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (ODNB Wilde entry)

Ruskin was also friendly with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who shared Ruskin's love of sketching (and definitely exceeded Ruskin's love of little girls)  and wished to illustrate his own works, such as The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Dodgson had already taken a step back from his work by publishing under the pseudonym 'Lewis Carroll'. Ruskin informed Dodgson that his talents as an artist were 'severely limited.' Dogdson took Ruskin's criticisms quite well, and relinquished even more artistic involvment in his work, hiring professionals to illustrate his books. Nonetheless, Dodgson continued to enjoy sketching and socialised with many artists who were also amongst Ruskin's circle of friends, such as Arthur Hughes, William Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, Alexander Munro, V. Princep, D. G. Rossetti, J. Sant, C. A. Swinburne, Mrs E. M. Ward, and G. F. Watts.

Ruskin is probably most famous for his relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, mainly Millais, through their mutual friend, the poet Coventry Patmore. Ruskin defended Millais and the Pre-Raphalites' style against the aesthetic orthodoxy established by dudes like Sir Joshua Reynolds and The Royal Academy, enabling mainstream acceptance of the artistic movement. Hopefully we'll come back to that. 

In Millais, Ruskin saw a successor to Turner, and due to the age difference, Ruskin was more like his patron and mentor. You'd think that it was a relationship that Ruskin would kick himself for later, as his wife Effie (Euphemia. i know, right?), ran off with (and later married) Millais. Actually, Ruskin was rather relieved, and the 5-year marriage annulled in court on the grounds that it was never consummated. Against charges of impotence, Ruskin apparently volunteered to drop trou and prove otherwise. Classy. Definitely the kind of thing one would expect from a Victorian art critic:

There is little that is certain about the intimate details of Ruskin's marriage to Euphemia Chalmers Gray beyond the fact that it was never consummated. A medical examination confirmed Effie's virginity, but in a legal deposition that was not introduced in court, Ruskin stated: 'I can prove my virility at once'. This was never put to the test, [thankfully!] but it seems likely that Ruskin was referring to masturbation. Again, there is no confirmation of this, but a letter to a confidante, Mrs Cowper, in 1868 in which he wrote 'Have I not often told you that I was another Rousseau?' has been taken as a discreet reference to the practice. [i don't get it...] At this same time he told a male friend that he had been capable of consummating his marriage, but that he had not loved Effie sufficiently to want to do so. (ODNB)

Nonetheless, Ruskin's conceptions of nature and beauty, combined with a mystical streak made for an interesting collaboration with the Pre-Raphaelites. These were also into reviving Blake, who was into pretty interesting things, among them, mystical Jewish symbolism. Here's a little teaser:

 

Falling Water; Frank Lloyd Wrong?

Today, my parents, my sister, and i went to see Falling Water. It was a remarkable experience. My mother and i had seen a documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright in preparation for the trip (yes, the nerdy apple falls not far from the nerdy tree...). I am happy we did, as the tour was rather superficial. Two things, possibly connected, were not addressed and continue to gnaw at my mind:

1) Mr. Wright had virtually no professional training
2) Mr. Wright was a total d-bag

After reading a few of Simon Winchester's books, it struck me (as i am sure was the intention) that many of the greatest innovations were achievements of people who lacked formal education (Winchester has written two books about the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman, and The Meaning of Everything). James Murray, the son of a Scottish draper was an autodidact who taught himself numerous languages, archaeology, and who was making accurate astronomical predictions before the age of 12, was the primary editor of the OED. In The Map That Changed the World, Winchester tells the shocking story of William Smith, the canal digger who despite bitter class-wars, became the father of modern geology.

Leonardo da Vinci, whose bastard-status prevented him from receiving classical education (which was probably an advantage because it forced him to observe the world rather than be bound to the Greek mindset of conceiving the world according to models) also comes to mind. John Harrison, a carpenter who taught himself clock-making, invented the marine chronometer,(which established longitude), revolutionising navigation in the 18th century. All of these people, including Wright, were laypeople. All of these people worked with their hands.

Wright actually put a premium on manual labour and stressed its relation to one's development as a person or as an artist. In his apprenticeship programme at Taliesen, pupils learnt by doing--and this included working in the fields, preparing meals, and maintaining the property. Wright told his students that it was as important for them to work with their hands, read poetry, cook, and listen to music, as it was to study great architectural works. In a similar way, T. S. Eliot describes the 'heterogeneous ideas' that create the unified experience in the poetry of John Donne:

The ordinary man falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Like Donne, Wright viewed his craft as a spiritual process, involving the cooperation of the natural with the supernatural. Donne often discusses the rectification of reason, the transformation or elevation of one's natural reason to a higher plane, contingent upon belief in God. In other words, belief in God is basically super-sizing your reason.

Conversely, Wright viewed nature as being rectified by humanity, or what he called organic architecture; 'a reinterpretation of nature’s principles as they had been filtered through the intelligent minds of men and women who could then build forms which are more natural than nature itself'.

Wright bucked the trend of industrial architecture, of modernism with all its machinery, dominating and subduing nature. He instead turned to craft; the spiritual space of a building, the craftsman's hands on the piece, the harmony between humanity and nature. Wright's philosophical commitment to architecture that is generated by its surroundings has made his horizontal planes practically iconic, and can be seen in his treatment of the boulders at Falling Water. Nature is not interrupted, nor is it displaced.

Lovely. It sounds like Wright had much in common with Donne. It also seems that his stint in Japan influenced him with a lot of Eastern thought about our place in nature, and body and mind and harmony stuff. So what's the problem? I guess i'm confused by a guy whose aesthetic is morally grounded but his actions were so scandalous and immoral.

The debate about morality's place in art, or as Benjamin Constant called it, l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) has been discussed by people such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarme, Wilde, Ruskin, Whistler, and loads of others. I've rattled them off like they're distant family members, but i've only read them superficially--click here for a more in-depth synopses. A few weeks ago, i attended a conference on early modern English thought, and was blown away by a paper about the impact of Paradise Lost on Kant's moral philosophy. It restored my faith in what initially drew me to literature, and though we (perhaps anachronistically) may disagree with much of what 17th century religious writers have to say, there is little doubt in my mind that they genuinely sought a moral life. As for Wright, i don't want to justify him. And only trite things come to mind about how someone with such a nice philosophy could be a total d-nozzle. Like the greater the person the greater temptations, so i suppose he just gave in to his. But that doesn't quite cut it. Thoughts, anyone? Bueller?