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late 1840s, 1850s and possibly beyond, he was closely
involved in their production. Over 200 daguerreotypes
mainly of Alpine subjects and architectural details are
attributed, directly or indirectly, to Ruskin. 125 of these
are extant and have been connected to Ruskin for some
time. A further 121, possibly dating from Ruskin’s visits
to Venice in the late 1840s up to 1852, together with 14
salt prints, which surfaced in 2006.
John Ruskin was born on 18th February 1819 at 54
Brunswick Square, London. He was the sole offspring
of a wine merchant father and an Evangelical mother.
As a youth he was privately tutored at home, visited a
number of art masters, developed a passion for the works
of Turner and travelled in Britain and Northern Europe
with his parents. In 1836 Ruskin became a Gentleman
Commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, which consider-
ably extended his education and social circle. He won
the prestigious Newdigate Prize for Poetry but poor
health delayed his graduation. However by 1843, the
fi rst volume of Modern Painters had been published by
“A Graduate of Oxford.”
Ruskin had an extraordinarily large and varied net-
work of associates and followers, a signifi cant number
of whom were involved in photography. One of these as-
sociates was John Henry Parker, an antiquarian who sold
photographs of archaeological investigations in Rome to
Ruskin in 1874, which subsequently featured in Slade
lectures. For a substantial period Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
was an ardent follower of Ruskin. Rossetti, similarly to
Ruskin, used photographs as visual aids and, at his family
home in Chelsea, posed with Ruskin and the artist Wil-
liam Bell Scott for William Downey on 29th June 1863.
Despite the appearance of relaxed conviviality suggested
by many of the photographs from this sitting, Ruskin ex-
pressed his dissatisfaction with his appearance and Scott
later candidly revealed his dislike of Ruskin in his 1892
autobiography. Some of the many others whom Ruskin
knew included Jemima Blackburn (née Wedderburn)
who conducted early experiments with photography
and Richard Calvert Jones who, like Ruskin, was taught
drawing by James Duffi eld Harding.
In large part because Ruskin was passionate about
art and traditional crafts and turned his visually attuned
mind towards mineralogy and botany among other sub-
jects, he had an aversion to the idea of progress expressed
in Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (1843–60),
the geological revelations in Charles Lyell’s The Prin-
ciples of Geology (1830–33) and the ideas of history
contained in Charles Darwin’s Theories of Evolution
(1859). Although early photography was a fundamental
breakthrough, Ruskin was able to embrace it because
it was tangible rather than theoretical and, above all, it
captured the kind of singular detail that Ruskin craved
in art, architecture and landscape scenery.
In a letter to his father in October 1845, Ruskin de-
scribed the daguerreotype as a blessed invention. He was
purchasing daguerreotypes by the end of his Normandy
tour in 1848 and took his own photographic equipment
to Switzerland in 1849 and, with his new wife Euphemia
(née Gray) to Venice in 1849–50. On 24th February
1850 she described Ruskin in St. Marks’s Square “with
a black cloth over his head taking daguerreotypes”
(Mary Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice, New York:
Vanguard Press, 1965, 146). At this time Ruskin was
assisted by his factotum John (known as George) Hobbs
(later Hobbes) who was in Ruskin’s service until 1854.
In Hobbs’ notebook entry for 1st May 1849, there is a
suggestion that he not only carried the photographic
equipment for Ruskin but also prepared and developed
the plates. This may have been a pattern that Ruskin con-
tinued with his new factotum, Frederick Crawley, who
was photographing with Ruskin in the Alps in 1854. This
would have freed Ruskin to select viewpoints, consider
compositional matters and check focus. However it is
possible that Ruskin was more involved in photography
than this interpretation allows.
Typically these dDaguerreotypes are 6" × 8" and
there is at least one example, Richard St. John Tyrwhitt’s
painting Mer de Glace of c. 1859, that was almost cer-
tainly based on a Ruskin daguerreotype. Whether Ruskin
was the fi rst to photograph the Matterhorn, as William
Gershom Collingwood claimed in 1884 is debatable
but in Praeterita (1885–89) Ruskin stated that he was
among the fi rst. Looking back over almost forty years
he discovered that his daguerreotypes recorded the
ebbing of glaciers. In a similar vein, the 1883 Epilogue
to Modern Painters contains Ruskin’s observation that
photographs of St. Mark’s in Venice demonstrated that
his own “careless” sketch for plate VI of The Stones of
Venice had omitted the entasis of the tower.
Ruskin recommended photographs as an aid to
drawing and cited Charles Thurston Thompson’s re-
production of Raphael’s St. Catherine as a model. He
also included photographic reproductions in some of
his publications such as the Autotypes in the 1890 edi-
tion of Val D’Arno and Carlo Naya’s photographs of
paintings in the 1890 edition of Giotto and his Works in
Padua. However Ruskin could be critical of photogra-
phy, remarking in The Elements of Drawing (1857) that
shadows were rendered much darker than they should
be. He was also concerned that colour photography
would also bring further distortions.
The 1870s brought Ruskin joys and sorrows. He
moved to Brantwood, an idyllically situated house in the
Lake District. However the deaths of his mother in 1871
and, in 1875, the death of Rose La Touche, the young
woman he had hoped would become his second wife,
signalled Ruskin’s gradual retrenchment from intellec-
tual life. Between these two bereavements, in September