John Ruskin, 19th Century, Watercolor

This beautiful watercolor drawing of unmatched quality can be assigned entirely likely to the great artist and thinker John Ruskin.
Ruskin's developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).
It contained 14 plates etched by the author.
The title refers to seven moral categories that Ruskin considered vital to and inseparable from all architecture: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience.
Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic.
In this important work, the very high quality of the stroke is matched by the skillful search for an atmosphere of recollection that only Ruskin's watercolors can create.


This artwork, never before on the market, comes from an important French private collection

Every item of our Gallery, upon request, is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Sabrina Egidi official Expert in Italian furniture for the Chamber of Commerce of Rome and for the Rome Civil Courts.

Professional packaging assured

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era.
He wrote on subjects as varied as art, architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth.
In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability, ethical consumerism, and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal duty of the artist is "truth to nature".
This meant rooting art in experience and close observation.
From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas.
His work increasingly focused on social and political issues.
Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis.
In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing.
In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society.
Its practical outcome was the founding of the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.
In 1833 they visited Strasbourg, Schaffhausen, Milan, Genoa and Turin, places to which Ruskin frequently returned.
He developed a lifelong love of the Alps, and in 1835 visited Venice for the first time, that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.
These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature.
His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age.
Before Ruskin began Modern Painters, John James Ruskin had begun collecting watercolours, including works by Samuel Prout and Turner.
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting Chamonix and Paris, studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Perugino among others at the Louvre.
In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time.
It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In Lucca he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture.
He drew inspiration from what he saw at the Campo Santo in Pisa, and in Florence. In Venice, he was particularly impressed by the works of Fra Angelico and Giotto in St Mark's Cathedral, and Tintoretto
in the Scuola di San Rocco, but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote.
It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.