ABSTRACT
Ruskin was born in the same year as Queen Victoria, who outlived him by twelve months and two days. His writings on art, culture and society are a product of the Victorian age, and, a hundred years after his death, help to define it. The chapters in this book examine his relationships with artists he revered, inspired, criticized, upset - relationships complicated by the fact that he was intellectually well equipped as a critic, and materially well sup plied as a patron. His interests, however, went well beyond criticism or patronage: he was concerned with architecture and design as well as paint ing, with the training of artists as well as the instruction their pictures gave to others. It mattered to him not just how art was produced, but how it was received, and by whom. He was interested in the entire Victorian visual economy, from high art to low, from the arrival of new artists to the reinter pretation of painters from the past.
