Word: ruskinism
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...John Ruskin had a rare eye for beauty. Directed outward, it helped make him the greatest art critic of his century, as well as a generous champion of social reform who hoped to remove a measure of industrial ugliness from the Victorian scene. In private life, though, this intense esthetic susceptibility proved an acute embarrassment. It embroiled him in a number of skittish skirmishes with women, all pretty and all too young. Like a "just-fledged owlet," as he put it, he began by pining helplessly for Adele Domecq, the dazzling but unobtainable daughter of his father's business...
Optic Nerve. After his graduation, the Updikes took a year just for fun at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, and in time he landed a staff job on The New Yorker. "He thought he'd be only a humorist," Mary remembers. "He didn't think of himself as a serious writer." Yet he spent words profligately in an attempt to translate his painter's eye into language, to catch and fix the thing seen and bring all the colors and shapes and textures of the visible world to bear on his narrative...
They read ecclesiastic history, pored over medieval manuscripts, and for relaxation visited cathedrals or read their contemporaries: Tennyson, who was writing about the knights of the Round Table, and Ruskin, who was writing about the ancient splendor and modern squalor in architecture. Morris got himself into an echoing rage when a suit of armor he had commissioned from the Oxford blacksmith (the better to pose for a picture) jammed its visor and locked the prophet within...
...artists themselves always knew that they were exaggerating, distorting, filtering-to express worship of the divine or a view of man, to make the real more real. But whether the emphasis was moralistic (said Tolstoi: "Art is the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings"), or emotional (Ruskin: "The first universal characteristic of art is tenderness"), or esthetic (Baudelaire: art is "the study of the beautiful"), or hedonistic (Santayana: "The value of art lies in making people happy"), the theory of art as imitation held on. It was finally destroyed in the 1880s-partly because of the appearance...
...clockmaker, and his father, a mechanical engineer who was sent to Scotland from South Bend, Ind., to manage the Singer sewing machine factory in Clydebank. Rickey also showed an early facility for drawing, and while at Balliol College, Oxford, he used to cross the street to sketch at the Ruskin School of Drawing...