John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskinwas the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth8 February 1819
There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.
Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.
Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.
But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.
You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.
We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.
There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.
I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.
I used to lie down on the grass and draw the blades as they grew - until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became a possession to me.
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.
... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)