ABSTRACT
When John Ruskin was elected Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869, the aesthetic battles with which he was most associated were, in some de gree, of the distant past. The death of J. M. W. Turner and the dissolution of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had both occurred almost twenty years earlier. Of the younger generation of artists over which Ruskin had a direct sway, most were used by him as copyists, reproducing works in order to illustrate his ever-widening cultural and social interests. Albert Goodwin was an important exception. As a leading landscape painter who had stud ied under Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown, Goodwin may be consid ered to have synthesized the most vital strands of Ruskin's aesthetic. This chapter explores not only Ruskin's influence on Goodwin, as the embodi ment of a tradition, but also Goodwin's response to that influence, especially as expressed retrospectively in the fascinating document of his diaries.1 These diaries (referenced as agd in this chapter) reveal how one extremely loyal protege questioned the thinking of Ruskin, particularly on the subject of colour, yet had to do so in Ruskinian terms, by constantly paralleling the visual and the spiritual.
