John Ruskin understood beauty and wonder to be the solution to the miseries of the urban poor and the key to living a worthwhile life. The most prominent critic of art and architecture of the nineteenth century, his books, pamphlets and open letters to the press influenced all classes of society, from labourers to lords. Currently he is perhaps almost as well known for his failed marriage (to Effie Gray, who left him for the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais) as he is for his art writings, but there is far more to Ruskin than is suggested by movies that portray him as a desk-bound effigy, a humourless Victorian prude.

Andrew Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s life and work into a fascinating account of a precocious individual tirelessly campaigning throughout Victorian England, and reveals in what ways and why Ruskin’s critical reputation endures. Encouraged by his parents to write about the ethical and spiritual value of art, it was in their lifetimes that Ruskin produced his best works – Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice and the essays on political economy published as Unto This Last. After their deaths Ruskin was bewildered, but eventually he put himself in the hands of a younger cousin. In relative seclusion at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in the Lake District, the cousin was able to guard Ruskin’s reputation while, hidden from the public gaze, Ruskin himself suffered a slow decline as his mind became irreversibly unhinged.

The originality of Ruskin’s influential books and essays imbued architecture and the arts with a uniquely forceful moral character. With fresh readings of the major texts, this new biography is an engaging, informing study of the life and times of a peerless campaigner of art practice as a means to life.