Works by John Ruskin

John Ruskin, the critic who argued that an artist's first duty is truth to nature, also made close studies of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes and buildings; nearly all the works below are drawings.

On a stay in Venice from November 1849 Ruskin drew the Doge's Palace, fearing the occupying Austrian troops would destroy it, and such sketches fed The Stones of Venice. Loggia of the Ducal Palace, Venice lines up thick columns, their capitals worked leaf by leaf under arches left in rough grey wash. Doorhead of the Palazzo Contarini della Porta di Ferro copies in pen and brown wash a carved arch of vines and small animals around an angel holding the words PAX HUIC DOMUI.

Landscapes are the commonest subject below, and mountains the commonest motif. Ruskin came to love the Alps on family tours as a boy. Mountain Landscape, Macugnaga, of 1845, is entirely in browns, from boulders and a log bridge to peaks half lost in cloud. In The Valley of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, of about 1866, a blue-grey cliff fills much of the sheet, its forest set down in tiny pen strokes.

He also made careful studies of natural forms. In 1856 he wrote that a painter who could render one leaf could render the world; Study of an Oak Leaf sets dry, curled oak foliage against dark blue-green wash. Peacock Feather, signed at Brantwood, his Coniston home, in 1877, packs the eye with blue and bronze and lets the barbs thin out into loose green lines. A note under Owl, After an Attic Kantharos says it was meant for Aratra Pentelici, his Oxford lectures on sculpture.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Yale Center for British Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait: W. & D. Downey.