John Ruskin

John Ruskin was one of the greatest Victorian critics of art and society - his art criticism included the five volumes of Modern Painters, as well as The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice - but he was also preoccupied with politics, economics and education, and had enormous influence on his own age and on ours. Haunted through much of his creative life by Venice, to him the symbol of a society's fall from moral health to corruption, he saw England in danger of similar decline and wrote passionately to avert it, advocating a revival of Gothic architecture and the use of natural materials, and powerfully defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. His later years were marked by emotional turmoil - his marriage was annulled, his subsequent relationship with the young Rose La Touche was fraught with anxiety, and in 1878 he lost a famous libel case brought by Whistler - and a bitter sense that his message had not been heeded.