John Ruskin-Between Art and Social Justice
John Ruskin-Between Art and Social Justice

Summary/Abstract: In the context of the English and European culture, John Ruskin holds a definite, if not unique place, as the leading English art critic of the Victorian period, watercolourist, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. This man, who supported with an unusual, persuasive force, almost imaginary theses in arts, morals, politics and political economy, had become some sort of “manager of consciousness” in the most conservative and practical European country of the 19th century. As regards art, in 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters a book that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him for the next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the depiction of Nature in Turner’s landscape paintings. After 1860, this aesthetically-based form of humanism makes way to some more concrete social preoccupations, in other words, a genuine search for social justice. Thackeray publishes in Cornhill Magazine some of his vehemently anti-bourgeois articles of political economy (1860), further continued by other writings which testifies a clear-cut, although rather confusing socialist orientation. In 1871 he writes a series of extremely violent pamphlets, subsequently gathered in the volume Fors Clavigera.

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