Modern Painters

Modern Painters is a work of art criticism by John Ruskin, published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860. Ruskin began it at the age of twenty-four, drawing on material gathered during a trip to Switzerland in 1842. Its initial aim was to defend the late work of J. M. W. Turner against the attacks it had received at the Royal Academy. The first volume argues that modern landscape painters, and Turner above all, surpass the old masters of the post-Renaissance period, whom Ruskin accuses of preferring pictorial convention to the truth of nature. For him, the artist should observe natural reality rather than invent it in the studio, and the truth he seeks is both material and moral.

The second volume, from 1846, turns away from Turner to focus on Renaissance and earlier artists, and takes a more theoretical tone. Here Ruskin links the aesthetic with the divine and holds that truth, beauty and religion are inseparably bound together. The third and fourth volumes, published in 1856, develop the idea that great art expresses the spirit of great men, and the fourth examines the geology of the Alps in landscape terms along with their moral influence on those who live among them. The fifth volume, from 1860, closes the work with studies of Giorgione, Veronese, Titian and Turner, proposing an organic view of the unity of great artworks.

The book received mixed reviews, but it drew the attention of literary and artistic figures such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, and it had a notable influence on the early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It also helped redefine art criticism as a discourse combining polemic, aesthetics, scientific observation and ethics.