Frederick Hollyer, “Portrait of John Ruskin (Datur Hora Quieti)” (ca. 1894), platinum print, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (all images courtesy of the Yale Center for ...

‘If you can paint one leaf,” John Ruskin once declared, “you can paint the world.” And in “Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin”—the hypnotically potent (though flawed) exhibition at the ...

Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man’s attributes.” So goes one of the best known of William James’s obiter dicta. It is not so widely known that James wrote those ...

THE year 1860, in which the fifth and last volume of Modern Painters was published, was the exact middle year of Ruskin’s life. The great work of his youth which had been his main occupation for ...

Tourism has a very bad press. It’s usually analyzed critically. Tourism brings too many over-privileged, historically ignorant people to foreign places. In the case of Venice, which I am writing a ...

AFTER my return from Europe in 1873, ten years passed before I again saw Ruskin. They were years of grave change and sad experience for him. He continued to engage in dangerous excess of dispersed and ...