John Ruskin

Abstract

The barometer of Ruskin’s influence can be read by the eulogies made of the man in his own time and after his death. It is little known that the great Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, paid a remarkable tribute in 1900 (the year of Ruskin’s death) when he said that ‘90 per cent of the theory of impressionist painting is … in [Ruskin’s book] “Elements of Drawing”. Monet may have been reminded of his debt to Ruskin when, a year earlier, in Paul Signac’s important ‘From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism’, a prominent place was given to ‘Elements of Drawing’. And, indeed, among Ruskin’s voluminous writings on art will be found brilliant and cogent discussions on perception and aesthetic theory of a remarkably prophetic character. Even the irascible Wyndham Lewis, in ‘The Demon of Progress in the Arts’ (1954), praised Ruskin as the only ‘word man’ the artist could trust.