Most visitors to the Lake District have never heard of John Ruskin. Almost everyone who spends a day learning about him wishes they had found him sooner.
Not Wordsworth, not Beatrix Potter — Ruskin. The art critic, social theorist, environmental campaigner and polymath who lived at Brantwood on the eastern shore of Coniston Water for the last thirty years of his life and who, more than any other single individual, established the intellectual framework through which the educated Victorian world thought about art, architecture, labour and landscape.
If you want to understand why the Lake District looks the way it does — why the National Trust exists, why the preservation of natural landscape is a moral rather than merely an aesthetic argument — Ruskin is where it starts.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the most influential art critic of the Victorian era and one of the most widely read English writers of the 19th century. His first major work, Modern Painters (1843), was written in defence of J.M.W. Turner and became a founding text of modern art criticism. His subsequent works — The Stones of Venice (1851–53), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Unto This Last (1862) — covered art, architecture, economics and social philosophy in a prose style that was simultaneously scholarly and passionately readable.
Ruskin's central argument — articulated across decades of writing — was that the quality of a civilization's art was inseparable from the quality of its labour and the justice of its social order. A society that degraded its workers produced degraded art; beauty in architecture and landscape was a moral as well as an aesthetic category. This argument made him one of the founding figures of the Arts and Crafts movement and a direct influence on William Morris, on the founders of the National Trust, and on the social democratic tradition in British politics.
In 1871, Ruskin bought Brantwood — a farmhouse on the eastern shore of Coniston Water — without having seen it, on the basis that no house in the Lake District on the edge of a lake could be otherwise than beautiful. He was largely right. The house, which he enlarged and developed over thirty years, has views across Coniston Water to the fells on the western shore that are among the finest from any private house in the Lake District.
Ruskin lived at Brantwood from 1872 until his death in 1900, with intermissions including periods of serious mental illness (what appears to have been a form of severe depression, exacerbated by overwork, personal grief and the progressive realisation that his social arguments were having little effect). In his final decade he wrote little — Praeterita, his unfinished autobiography, is the main work of this period — but he continued to receive visitors and to maintain Brantwood as a centre of intellectual activity.
Brantwood is now managed by a charitable trust and is open to the public seasonally. It contains the largest collection of Ruskin's drawings and watercolours in the world (he was a highly accomplished draughtsman and painter) and a programme of temporary exhibitions and events related to his work and legacy.
Turner and the landscape — Ruskin's defence of Turner, and his development of the concept of the "naturalistic" tradition in landscape art, was directly relevant to how the Lake District was subsequently understood and valued as a landscape of artistic significance. The Lake District that Turner painted — and that Ruskin interpreted — established the visual vocabulary through which subsequent generations have seen and valued this landscape.
The National Trust — the founders of the National Trust — Octavia Hill, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley and Robert Hunter — were directly influenced by Ruskin's arguments about the moral value of natural landscape and the right of the public to access it. Rawnsley, who met Ruskin, applied Ruskin's ideas directly in the formation of the Trust.
The Arts and Crafts movement — the Arts and Crafts tradition in the Lake District — the furniture makers, the metalworkers, the weavers of Windermere and Ambleside in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — was directly inspired by Ruskin and Morris. The Armitt Museum in Ambleside holds significant material related to this tradition.
A bespoke Ruskin day would typically include: Brantwood (the house and grounds, with discussion of Ruskin's life, ideas and the specific rooms associated with different phases of his work); Coniston village (including the grave and the Ruskin Museum, which holds significant collections relating to his life); and the Coniston Water landscape that Ruskin contemplated from his study window for thirty years.
For guests with a specific interest in art history, the day can be extended to include relevant material at the Armitt Museum in Ambleside.
Interested in a Ruskin bespoke day? Contact us here or see our bespoke tours page.
More bespoke tour themes:
At Brantwood, on the eastern shore of Coniston Water, for the last thirty years of his life.
Modern Painters (1843), written in defence of J.M.W. Turner.
That the quality of a civilisation's art was inseparable from the quality of its labour and the justice of its social order.
