John Ruskin

John Ruskin was a major Victorian critic whose writing joined art, architecture, ethics, and social thought. In Modern Painters, he argued for close attention to nature and the expressive force of painting, while The Stones of Venice turned buildings into evidence of cultural values, labor, and belief.

His prose can be passionate, exacting, and argumentative, moving from visual description to moral judgment in a single sweep. John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies and Fors Clavigera Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain show how widely his concerns reached, from education and reading to work, responsibility, and public life.