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.

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist.

Apr 9, 2025 · John Ruskin, English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.

Ruskin was an avid promoter of Gothic architecture and his writing influenced a widespread return from Neoclassicism to the earlier Gothic style. His work inspired architects including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Walter Gropius and his ideas are said to have been influential in the foundation of the Garden City Movement.

John Ruskin was a famous artist, and writer, art critic of the Victorian era, and was born on February 8, 1819, in London, England. He was born to a noble family where his father – John James Ruskin was a wealthy Scots wine merchant.

John Ruskin was one of the greatest Victorians; his range of interests and achievements were quite staggering. He was an artist, art critic, amateur geologist, a teacher, writer, social critic and philosopher.

With his championing of early Italian “primitives,” Gothic architecture, “truth” in the depiction of nature and “organic” architecture, Ruskin, as one art critic writes, “shaped a whole sensibility.”