Room 9
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
Why did not our God make me but a little stronger - her but a little wiser - both of us happy?

From 1860 onwards Ruskin's view of the world darkened. His art criticism became social criticism as he argued against the avarice and exploitation that left people blind to nature and indifferent to art. His struggle made him both sad and angry, as his attempt to forge a new unity between great art and a just society broke down in the face of philistinism and greed. But there were private as well as public reasons for his feelings of failure and fragmentation.

Charles Fairfax Murray Portrait of John Ruskin1877 © Tate Gallery

At the beginning of the 1860s he had fallen in love with a young girl, Rose La Touche (no.230). Tragically, in view of Ruskin's past, Rose was deeply influenced by her father's Evangelical Protestant beliefs, and she showed signs of mental instability from an early age. In 1866, when she was eighteen and he forty-seven, Ruskin asked her to marry him, in spite of the scandal of the annulment of his previous marriage. Rose did not refuse him, or accept, but her parents objected and Ruskin's following years were spent in an agony of hope and disappointment as her condition worsened (no.240), until her death in 1875 left him broken-hearted.

Ruskin's own mental health began to fail during a winter of study in Venice. In his obsessive drawing of Carpaccio's Dream of St Ursula (no.244) there, he began to identify St Ursula with the dead Rose La Touche. In 1877 he had the first of a series of attacks of insanity, which in spite of periods of recovery, silenced him ten years before his death in 1900. The increasing mental strain can be seen in the series of Ruskin's self-portraits (nos.229,234,236,238,245).

This room shows the public and the private tragedies that overwhelmed Ruskin, rejected in drawings from 1858, the year he first met Rose, to 1889, when he fell silent. His study of nature (nos.246-54) showed him that industrial pollution had produced what he called 'the storm-cloud of the nineteenth century', a physical symbol of exploitation and greed. His drawings of clouds tell their own story. The parallel account of his relationship with Rose La Touche is traced through the portraits and self-portraits that record a doomed love affair.