RUSKIN, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Modern Painters. First editions of volumes III, IV, and V, later revised editions of volumes I and II. These volumes supply a complete set of Ruskin's defence of modern painters, which the author began after reading a newspaper review attacking Turner's contributions to the 1842 Royal Academy exhibition. As the first volume, here in its fifth edition, was published anonymously in 1843, the 1851 edition finally put Ruskin's name to the work. Modern Painters spanned the entire 17-year period of Ruskin's writings about art and "it is a little difficult now to understand the dominance exercised by Ruskin upon two whole generations" (PMM). The illustrations, created as diagrams to accompany the text, are now thought some of the most "original watercolours ever executed" (PMM). The defence of Turner produced a sensational impact, and the writings generally formed "the artistic taste of the second half of the nineteenth century" (PMM). Although these works had a foundational impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when the fifth volume was published, Dante Gabriel Rossetti gibed that the subjects would be Old Masters themselves by the time Ruskin finished.

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