1225
1873, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe photographed Ruskin,
followed by Lewis Carroll in 1875. William Jeffrey
captured an early Ruskin portrait in 1856 and Ruskin
sat for Caldesi in 1862. By the time John McClelland
photographed him in the 1890s, Ruskin had been broken
by a legal battle with Whistler but had completed his
autobiography. Ruskin died in 1900 and was buried at
St. Andrew’s in Coniston. He is commemorated in Poet’s
Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Janice Hart
Biography
Ruskin was born in London in 1819, the sole offspring
of a wine merchant father and an Evangelical mother.
As a youth he was privately tutored in art and a wide
range of subjects and travelled widely in Britain and
Europe with his parents. He went on to Christ Church
Oxford in 1836, won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry
but sat for his degree much later than expected because
of ill health. In 1843, inspired by the works of Turner
and the new generation of Pre-Raphaelite artists, he
produced Modern Painters, the fi rst of fi ve volumes of
art criticism infl ected, like most of his later writing, with
social commentary. He was a prolifi c writer, eloquent
lecturer (both before and after he became the fi rst Slade
Professor of Fine Art in 1869) a productive artist and
an occasional designer. He also took a keen interest in
photography producing (or overseeing the production
of) upwards of 200 Daguerreotypes, many taken in Italy
during an 1849–50 a tour with his new wife Euphemia
(née Gray). The trajectory of Ruskin’s interest in photog-
raphy began with the Daguerreotype and, over a period
of sixty years encompassed photography’s numerous
technical, artistic and social transformations. Ruskin’s
early enthusiasm for photography’s ability to render
singularity of detail, particularly architectural and land-
scape detail, gave way to a criticism of photography’s
tonal rendition and later, a questioning of photography’s
capacity for artistry and an apprehension concerning the
likely distortions of colour photography. These shifts in
opinion give considerable interest to Ruskin’s various
references to photography because he can be seen as a
barometer, if an idiosyncratic and sometimes aberrant
one, of changing public attitudes. Ruskin occasionally
included photo-mechanical prints in his publications
such as the Autotypes which appear in the 1890 edi-
tion of Val D’Arno. Ruskin also sat for a large number
of photographers including William Jeffrey, William
Downey and Frank Meadow Sutcliffe. The ill health that
troubled him whilst an undergraduate student developed
into a number of physical and mental complications,
particularly from the 1870s following the deaths of his
mother and the woman he had hoped would become his
second wife, Rose La Touche. Ruskin went into semi
retirement in the last decade of his life at Brantwood,
the house he purchased in the early 1870s. He died there
in 1900, one of the indisputable sages of the nineteenth
century. He is buried at St. Andrew’s at Coniston and
commemorated at Westminster Abbey.See also: Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Carroll,
Lewis); Daguerreotype, Jones, Calvert Richard;
Downey, William Ernest, Daniel, & William Edward;
Naya, Carlo; Parker, John Henry; Rossetti, Dante
Gabriel; Sutcliffe, Frank Meadow; and Thompson,
Charles Thurston.Further Reading
Complete Works, edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander
Wedderburn, 39 volumes, London: George Allen, 1903–
1912.
Heather Birchall, ‘Contrasting Visions: Ruskin: the Daguerreo-
type and the Photograph’ in Living Pictures, vol. 2, no. 1,
2003, 88–92.
Susan Casteras and Anthony Lace Gully et al., John Ruskin and
the Victorian Eye, New York: Harry N. Abrams in association
with Phoenix Art Museum, 1993. Publication commemorates
the exhibition The Art of Seeing: John Ruskin and the Victo-
rian Eye, 1993. Also shown at the Indianapolis Museum of
Art, 1993.
Michael Harvey, “Ruskin and Photography,” in Oxford Art Jour-
nal, no. 7, 1985, 25–33.
Mary Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice, New York: Vanguard
Press, 1965.
Jeremy Maas, John Ruskin and His Circle, London: Maas Gallery,
(exhibition catalogue) 1991.
Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: the
Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphael-
ites, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, “A Day’s Sunshine at Brantwood,” in
Amateur Photographer, 9th February 1900, 107–108.RUSSELL, ANDREW JOSEPH
(1832–1909)
American photographerThe building of the fi rst transcontinental railroad by the
Union Pacifi c and Central Pacifi c Railroads generated
an enormous interest among the American public creat-
ing both a market for photographic images of Western
America and a means for photographers to transport
bulky equipment to remote regions. Andrew Joseph Rus-
sell was the offi cial Union Pacifi c photographer in 1868
and 1869 and one of many to follow who took advantage
of this interest in the railroad and the sights along the
line. He took over 250 large-format glass-plate nega-
tives and 500 stereo-view negatives mostly in Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Utah. Some of these images are classics
of 19th Century American photography including one of
the best-known images in American history (for years
misidentifi ed as a C.R. Savage photograph) of the two