 
Room 10
Conclusion
The teaching of art is the teaching of all things
Ruskin's life as a critic began and ended with Turner, whom he continued to interpret and defend until the publication
of the 'Epilogue' to Modern Painters in 1889 closed his working life. Before illness overwhelmed
him, Ruskin continued to write about contemporary art, and gave vital encouragement to Holman Hunt, struggling to complete what Ruskin
saw as the last Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, The Triumph of the Innocents (no.258). This and
Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (no.259), which Ruskin called 'the central picture in Turner's career', bring the polarities
of his critical creed together in two symbolic works - radically different
in style, but similarly mystical in content.
William Holman Hunt 1827-1910
The Triumph of the Innocents 1883-4
© Tate Gallery
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Ruskin's working life ended in 1889, but his teaching went on, as it
still does. It is represented by works from the two institutions he founded during the 1870s, the
Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford, and The Guild of St George. Both exist today. The School
offered a practical training for the hand and eye that would also shape the mind (no.256). The Guild
was a more utopian vision, but Ruskin intended it as an example of what might be done as social reform,
offering co-operation and environmentalism in the place of exploitation and industrialism. The Museum he created
for the Guild in Sheffield made a new form of education and intellectual recreation available to ordinary people. It also became
a repository for the works he commissioned in his successful battle to
save Venice and St Mark's from brutal restoration (no.257).
Ruskin's books spoke for him when he no longer could. His ideas influenced not only the founders of the National
Trust, the Labour Party and the modern Welfare State, but admirers as different as Marcel Proust, Leon Tolstoy and Mahatma Ghandhi.
Each took something different; all learned from Ruskin that 'the teaching of Art is the teaching of all things.'
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