John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an English critic of art, architecture and society, the only child of a prosperous sherry merchant. Modern Painters, begun in 1843 in defense of Turner and completed in five volumes over seventeen years, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice made him the dominant voice on art in Victorian Britain. From 1860, with Unto This Last, he turned to the condition of the working classes and the morality of wealth, writing Sesame and Lilies, The Crown of Wild Olive and Fors Clavigera. Oxford's first Slade Professor of Fine Art, he spent his last decades in silence at Brantwood on Coniston Water.