John Ruskin was born to a Scottish sherry merchant by the name of John James. Interestingly, he lived almost exactly as long as Queen Victoria, from 1819 to the year 1900. From childhood, his father supported an interest in the arts and encouraged his son to write poetry and paint, showing particular favoritism to the artist J.M.W. Turner, with whom Ruskin had a close relationship with for most of his life. His mother was very into gardening, which could have influenced his later preference for art to represent the natural world. Growing up religiously in the Catholic church also instilled in him a strong, faith-based world view. As a young man, he attended and graduated from Oxford, and shortly after published the first volume of Modern Painters. In totality, he would end up writing five separate volumes in this series over the course of seventeen years.

In 1849, he married childhood friend Effie Gray. However, this marriage was infamously ended due to a failure to consummate, and Effie did in fact undergo an examination to prove her virginity before breaking the marriage off and instead to marry Ruskin’s close friend John Everett Millais. At the time, this was very scandalous. The attached image is a drawing by Millais titled “Married for Love” which is thought to be related to falling in love with Effie. After this annulment, Ruskin seems to have developed a highly questionable attraction to young girls. He met Rose La Touche when she was only ten, and proposed to her at eighteen--when he was considerably older than her. She died at 27 years old but Ruskin insisted that he was visited by her spiritual presence after her death.

Nevertheless, Ruskin went on to continue writing for a large majority of his life, and eventually self-publishing. His very last work was an unfinished autobiography. Nearing the end of his life, he was onset with bouts of madness and what was probably serious mental illness. He was taken care of by his cousin Joan, who burned all of the letters between Ruskin and Rose shortly after his death, as well as any memorials he kept of her, which may have been performed by his own instruction.

Image Information: 

CREATOR: John Everett Millais

TITLE: Married for love

WORK TYPE: drawing

DATE: 1853

Additional Readings: 

Alexandra Mullen. “John Ruskin: A Brave, Unhappy Life.” The Hudson Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 2000, pp. 407–19. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3853022. Accessed 15 Sept. 2023.

Dearden, James S. “The Portraits of Rose La Touche.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 120, no. 899, 1978, pp. 92–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/879105. Accessed 15 Sept. 2023.

97. F. G. “John Ruskin.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 1, no. 4, 1893, pp. 491–97. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27527781. Accessed 15 Sept. 2023.