John Ruskin (1819-1900) British, Collected Works Published 1907. Combined reprints of "Time and Tide" (originally printed in 1867) and "The Crown of Wild Olive" (originally printed in 1866). 

Size: 4 x 6 1/8 x 1 1/8 in. 

#3102 #11 . 

John Ruskin (February 8th, 1819 - January 20th, 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Viollet-le-Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris. Ruskin’s writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterized his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasized the connections between nature, art and society. Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th Century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft. Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of “Modern Painters” (1843), an extended essay in defense of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is “truth to nature.” From the 1850s onward he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were in turn influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues, and in 1869 Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. Unhappy in nearly all his personal relationships throughout his life, he devoted most of his energy to teaching, creating generations of like-minded scholars, artists, and politicians who helped shape the course of British society for over a century. His death from the flu in 1900 was mourned around the world by people as diverse as Proust, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, and the utopian socialist society he started in 1871, the Guild of St. George, still exists today.