Modern Painters

Modern Painters
Name	Modern Painters
Author	John Ruskin
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Art criticism
Publisher	Smith, Elder & Co.
Pub date	1843–1860

Modern Painters is a five-volume art criticism work by John Ruskin originally published between 1843 and 1860. It defends the work of J. M. W. Turner and articulates principles that influenced debates around Impressionism, Realism, Pre-Raphaelitism and later Symbolism. The text shaped Victorian aesthetics and informed thinkers, artists, and institutions across Europe and North America.

Definition and Historical Context

Ruskin framed Modern Painters as a response to prevailing tastes promoted by figures such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and institutions like the Royal Academy of Arts. He positioned Turner against academic painters linked to the French Academy and critics associated with Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. The work converses with events and movements including the Industrial Revolution, the Great Exhibition, and developments in British art alongside continental shifts epitomized by Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, and later Claude Monet.

Major Movements and Styles

The book intersects with multiple movements: Romanticism as embodied by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais; and emergent Impressionism figures such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot. Ruskin’s ideas also resonated with Arts and Crafts Movement proponents including William Morris and influenced later Symbolist painters like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Debates invoked critics and collectors such as John Ruskin’s interlocutors Charles Lock Eastlake, Samuel Courtauld, and dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel.

Notable Artists and Works

Ruskin’s advocacy elevated J. M. W. Turner’s works including The Fighting Temeraire, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway and Sunrise with Sea Monsters in critical discussion. Pre-Raphaelite works such as Ophelia (Millais), The Hireling Shepherd and The Awakening Conscience became focal points alongside Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (Manet). Impressionist milestones like Impression, Sunrise, Water Lilies, and Bal du moulin de la Galette are part of the wider narrative, as are realist canvases by Gustave Courbet including A Burial at Ornans and works by Jean-François Millet such as The Gleaners. Later figures linked to Ruskinian influence include John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Cézanne with paintings like The Bathers and Mont Sainte-Victoire. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists referenced in critical lineage include Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Georges Seurat, Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Giovanni Bellini, Michelangelo, Raphael, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Gustave Klimt, Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Techniques and Materials

Ruskin emphasized observation of nature and fidelity to visual phenomena, praising Turner’s handling of light and atmospheric effects achieved with oil on canvas and watercolor techniques practiced by Turner. Discussions engage technical methods used by Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters who favored egg tempera and glazing, and by Impressionists who adopted plein air oil painting with broken brushwork, as in works by Monet and Pissarro. Later technical dialogues include fresco practice linked to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, printmaking traditions of Albrecht Dürer, and experimental media employed by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso’s collages, and Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

Critical Reception and Influence

Contemporaries such as John Ruskin’s critics Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and patrons like Thomas Gambier Parry debated his theses. Ruskin influenced institutions and personalities including William Morris, Gustav Stickley, collectors like Samuel Courtauld and Henry Clay Frick, and curators at the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Musée d'Orsay, Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His moralized aesthetics informed discourses touching figures like John Ruskin’s readers Oscar Wilde and later historians such as Ernst Gombrich.

Market and Institutional Recognition

Ruskin’s championing of specific works affected the art market where dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel and collectors such as J. Paul Getty and Andrew W. Mellon shaped prices and museum holdings. Institutions that acquired or displayed works discussed in Modern Painters include the National Gallery of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, Louvre Museum, British Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, and regional galleries tied to patrons like Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick. Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's later set records for artists linked to the book’s influence.

Category:Art criticism Category:John Ruskin