ABSTRACT
John Ruskin was born of a possessive mother and wine-merchant father. He published the first volume of his series Modern Painters, establishing the importance of the painter Joseph Turner, when he was 24 years of age. By the 1860s Ruskin was drawing significant connections between art and architecture on the one hand, and the natural world and social and economic conditions on the other. The conditions of industrial mass production, he argued, were destructive of human sensibility and of a harmonious relationship with nature. They involved making the worker into a tool, his fingers like cog-wheels and his arms like compasses. Gothic architecture, furthermore, is the product of the medieval guild system, which Ruskin viewed with romantic eyes as embodying 'healthy and ennobling labour'. Ruskin was a powerful influence on the development of socialism, on the arts and crafts movement of the later nineteenth century, and on a diverse range of thinkers.
