Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: Ruskin's political writing has generally been construed as a later pursuit separate from his earlier work in aesthetics.Rather than attributing his radical politics to his deep religious conviction, his hndamentalist upbringing, or the influence of Thomas Carlyle and other social reformers, this thesis is an endeavour to ground the origin and expression of Ruskin's politics in the aesthetics of landscape which he and his readers shared.The way Ruskin's contemporaries read his commentaries on both art and politics was determined to a great degree by the long tradition of English landscape painting and poetry.Prior to Ruskin's time, the British admiration for European masters and aesthetics became hsed with national concepts of property and ownership to produce emblems of felicity and propriety that both rationalized and disguised inequitable social conditions.In turn, this ideology of ownership and the practice of aestheticizing the topography of Britain was disseminated to a much wider population through the popular cult of the picturesque.Ruskin was an avid follower of the picturesque as a young man, and few of his contemporaries had studied as many paintings as he by the time he started to write Modem Painters (1 843)' an early work in which painting and politics merge.Despite vii Preface To avoid a conhsion in terms I reserve the actual word "landscape" to denote any form of constructed representation, and endeavour to use words like "countryside," CC scene," "view," "land," "geography," or a similar term to denote the physical topography itself, which may in turn be transformed into a landscape by a painter, poet, or gardener.This thesis does not directly address issues of landscape gardening or landscape architecture largely because they do not figure prominently in Ruskin's work.They are fascinating areas of study but there is not space here to do them justice, except by allusion to their role in estate planning and in the development of the picturesque.John Dixon Hunt discusses Ruskin and the garden in Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.:
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Rory Wallace
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W608623566