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Room 8
A New Era of Art
Whole picture galleries of dreams
After Ruskin published the final volume of Modern Painters in 1860, he turned his attention from the visual economy to the political economy
that supported it, beginning with his most celebrated work of social criticism, Unto This Last. For five years he was publicly silent on matters
of art. His silence rejected a crisis felt throughout Victorian culture as a confident materialism was undermined by religious doubt.
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882
Beata Beatrix circa 1864-70
© Tate Gallery
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Ruskin's abandonment in 1858 of a narrow Evangelical Protestantism in exchange for a more liberal and
humanistic faith was part of a wider shift in feeling. Artists rejected naturalism and storytelling in favour of new forms of
transcendental expression, as seen in Rossetti's Beata Beatrix (no.215). Beauty would become the new religion, evident,
for example, in Burne-Jones's The Mill (no.219). From these cross-currents there emerged the Aesthetic movement, which reached its apogee
with the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877.
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James Abbott McNeill Whistler 1834-1903
Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge circa 1872-5
© Tate Gallery
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Ruskin's attack on Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket (not exhibited) at the Grosvenor, and his defeat in the libel case that Whistler brought against him in response to his criticisms, appeared to signal that he had lost touch with contemporary art. But Ruskin had always celebrated the work of the imagination, and this room shows
that Ruskin's relationship with the artists associated with the Aesthetic movement was more complex, and more positive, than the clash with Whistler suggests.
When he returned to writing about art in the later 1860s, Ruskin advocated an approach to painting that celebrated the spiritual, the pure and the beautiful, an approach that became one of the features of the
art of the next decade. This new spirit in painting can be seen in Burne-Jones's The Golden Stairs (no.220), Albert Moore's Blossoms (no.217)
and GF Watts's Psyche (no.216).
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