Indistinctness is my forte: Turner, Ruskin and the climate of art
- Submitting institution
-
Cardiff Metropolitan University / Prifysgol Metropolitan Caerdydd
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- ENG022
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
-
- Book title
- Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780367076726
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Research process
John Ruskin’s art and writing are heavily indebted to J. M. W. Turner and numerous critics have accordingly argued that Ruskin’s more successful works could not exist without the painter’s influence. The first half of this chapter argues for the ongoing influence of Turner’s landscape art on a wide range of Ruskin’s work, from his early volumes of Modern Painters (1843-5) to The Harbours of England (1856), The Queen of The Air (1869), and his two lectures The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). For Ruskin, Turner offered an alternative model of looking at the landscape, which shaped Ruskin’s radical critique of industrial modernity. Like Turner, Ruskin uses landscape art as an analogue for relations in other spheres, such as history and politics; and his various responses to air and water pollution of paintings such as The Fighting Téméraire (1838), Snow Storm (1842), and Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844) illuminate some key aspects of Turner’s work, including his anxieties about environmental degradation, but also related cultural questioning such as the association between ecological disasters with the transatlantic slave trade as in The Slave Ship (1840).
Research insights
The aim of this chapter is thus first, to examine how Turner’s art and Ruskin’s responses to it reflect and shape the way we see the landscape and the environment; and second, to illuminate the ways in which the radical questions raised by Turner’s landscapes found new answers and forms of signification in the work of a Victorian thinker.
Dissemination
This book chapter was published in a collection of essays entitled Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts (Routledge 2019), edited by Shun-lian Chao and John Corrigan with a foreword by James Engell (Harvard University).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
