By Catherine Chuter

Modern Painters by John Ruskin (1843-60) is a five-volume work that was primarily written as defense of the painter Turner’s later work, in which Ruskin focused on the idea of truth to nature. In volume one (1843), Ruskin begins his argument by stating that modern British landscape painters, like W.J.M. Turner, represented nature better than the landscape traditions upheld by the Royal Academy. The negative or lack of recognition for Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) spurred Ruskin to defend Turner as a visionary whose work revealed the profound truth of nature, leading Ruskin to write the first volume of Modern Painters, a monumental work which he went to develop into five volumes over 17 years. This first volume denigrated the influence of the Neoclassical artists, such as Claude Lorrian, and the Dutch and Flemish schools of landscape, as Ruskin disparages the creators of monotonous seascapes by “the various Van somethings and Back somethings” who “libelled the sea.” The first volume is focused on the “truth of nature” in landscape painting whereas the second volume, shaped by Ruskin’s travels in Italy in 1845, expanded on the role of the artistic imagination. By 1849, Ruskin’s ideas in Modern Painters began to influence the emerging Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as their commitment to the “truth of nature” aligned with Ruskin’s criticism of art. Their challenges to the Royal Academy’s Neoclassical principles prompted Ruskin in turn to engage with foundational concepts. In Modern Painters III (1856), therefore, he discusses the Grand Style, which he reinterprets in terms of truth-to-nature. At the same time, his theory of the “pathetic fallacy” shifts from thinking about Romantic notions of art as a vehicle for individual imagination and emotion toward a more socially responsible art grounded in realism and accurate portrayal of contemporary life. Ruskin’s Modern Painters ultimately redefined the standards for British art, bridging the Romantic and realist aesthetics while also advocating for art’s ethical obligations.