Turner and John Ruskin: The Critic Whose Modern Painters Made Him

How John Ruskin came to write Modern Painters

John Ruskin was born in 1819, when Turner was already an Academician of seventeen years' standing. The first volume of Modern Painters appeared in 1843, published anonymously by a writer described on the title page only as a graduate of Oxford. Its purpose was narrow: to answer the critic who had mocked Turner's recent exhibits.

What began as a rebuttal expanded into one of the longest sustained arguments in English art criticism. Five volumes appeared between 1843 and 1860, and the project outgrew its subject entirely, taking in geology, botany, cloud formation and the moral condition of art. Turner remained the spine of it throughout.

Truth to nature, the critic’s central claim

Ruskin's central claim was that Turner was the most truthful landscape painter who had ever lived. Where critics saw wild handling and impossible colour, Ruskin argued that Turner had simply looked harder than anyone else at how water actually moves, how clouds are actually built and how light actually behaves on a wet surface.

To sustain that case he studied the natural phenomena himself, in detail that occasionally overwhelms the argument. The method was effective because it moved the debate off taste and onto evidence. A reader who accepted Ruskin's observations about wave form had to concede that Turner's version was closer to nature than the convention it replaced.

John Ruskin cataloguing the Turner Bequest

After Turner's death in 1851 the Bequest came to the nation as an enormous and disordered mass of material. Ruskin took on the work of sorting it, spending long stretches in 1857 and 1858 going through tens of thousands of drawings and sketchbook pages at the National Gallery and arranging a selection for public display.

The labour was real and the results are still with us, since much of the early framework for understanding the Bequest was his. His judgements also shaped what was shown and what stayed in storage for decades, and later curators have had to undo some of his choices, particularly where he suppressed material he found improper.

The Turner paintings Ruskin owned

Ruskin's father bought Turners, and Ruskin accumulated a substantial collection of his own, including The Slave Ship, given to him as a new year present in 1844. He lived among the paintings he was writing about, which gave his criticism an intimacy few reviewers could match and a partiality he never entirely acknowledged.

He also gave many works away and sold others. The Slave Ship left his hands in 1872, and by his own account the subject had become difficult to keep in the house. The dispersal of his collection scattered important Turners into museums on both sides of the Atlantic, where a good many of them remain.

The later doubts

Ruskin's admiration was not static. In the later volumes his tone darkens, and he writes about Turner's last years as a decline into something bleak instead of a triumph of freedom. He found the late work's pessimism hard to accept, having built his case on Turner as a witness to the glory of creation.

That tension is worth keeping in view, because Ruskin's Turner is a construction as much as a description. He gave the painter a moral seriousness the Victorian public could respect, and he did it by emphasising truth and fidelity over the qualities twentieth-century critics would later prize, which were closer to abstraction than observation.