Ruskin's architectural studies, of which The Seven Lamps was the first fruit, turned him from Turner and Modern Painters. He planned a book about Venice in 1845, and The Stones of Venice was announced in 1849 as in preparation. Af ter intense study in Italy and at home, early in 1851 (the year of the Great Exhibition in London) the first volume of The Stones of Venice appeared (aet. 32). It was a concrete expansion of the ideas of The Seven Lamps—that the buildings and art of a people are the expression of their religion, their morality, their national aspirations and social habits. It was, as Carlyle wrote to the author, "a sermon in stones," "a singular sign of the times," "a new Renaissance." It appeared in the same year with The Construction of Sheepfolds —a plea for the reunion of Christian churches—in the same year with the essay on Pre-Raphaelitism, the year of Turner's death (19th December). The Stones of Venice was illustrated with engravings by some of the most refined artists of his time. The author spent a world of pains in having these brought up to the highest perfection of the reproductive art, and began the system of exquisite illustration, and those facsimiles of his own and other sketches, which make his works rank so high in the catalogues and price-lists of collectors. This delicate art was carried even farther in the later volumes of Modern Painters by the school of engravers whom Ruskin inspired and gathered round him. And these now rare and coveted pieces remain to rebuke us for our modern preference for the mechanical and unnatural chiaroscuro of photo gravure—the successor and destroyer of the graver's art.
Although Ruskin was practised in drawing from the time that he could hold a pencil, and had lessons in painting from some eminent artists, he at no time attempted to paint pictures. He said himself that he was unable to compose a picture, and he never sought to produce anything that he would call a work of original art. His drawings, of which he produced an enormous quantity, were always intended by himself to be studies or memoranda of buildings or natural objects precisely as they appeared to his eye. Clouds, mountains, landscapes, towers, churches, trees, flowers and herbs were drawn with wonderful precision, minuteness of detail and delicacy of hand, solely to recall some specific aspect of nature or art, of which he wished to retain a record. In his gift for recording the most subtle char acters of architectural carvings and details, Ruskin has hardly been surpassed by the most distinguished painters.
In 1853 The Stones of Venice was completed at Herne Hill, and he began a series of Letters and Notes on pictures and archi tecture. In this year (aet. 34) he opened the long series of public lectures wherein he came forward as an oral teacher and preacher, not a little to the alarm of his parents and amidst a storm of controversy. The Edinburgh Lectures (November 1853) treated Architecture, Turner and Pre-Raphaelitism. The Manchester Lec tures (July 1857) treated the moral and social uses of art, now embodied in A Joy for Ever. Some other lectures are reprinted in On the Old Road and The Two Paths (1859). These lectures did not prevent the issue of various Notes on the Royal Academy pictures and the Turner collections ; works on the Harbours of England (1856); on the Elements of Drawing (1857); the Ele ments of Perspective (1859). At last, after prolonged labour,
the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters was published in 186o (aet. 41). This marks an epoch in the career of John Ruskin; and the year 186o closed the series of his works on art strictly so called.
The last forty years of his life were devoted to expounding his views, or rather his doctrines, on social and industrial problems, on education, morals and religion, wherein art becomes an inci dental and instrumental means to a higher and more spiritual life.
And his teaching was embodied in an enormous series of lectures, letters, articles, selections and serial pamphlets. These are now collected in upwards of thirty volumes in the final edition. The entire set of Ruskin's publications amounts to more than fifty works having distinctive titles. For some years before 186o Ruskin had been deeply stirred by reflecting on the condition of all industrial work and the evils of modern society. His lectures on art had dealt bitterly with the mode in which buildings and other works were produced. In 1854 he joined F. D. Maurice, T. Hughes and several of the new school of painters, in teaching classes at the Working Men's College. But it was not until 186o that he definitely began to propound a new social scheme, de nouncing the dogmas of political economy. Four lectures on this topic appeared in the Cornhill Magazine until the public dis approval led the editor, then W. M. Thackeray, to close the series. They were published in 1862 as Unto this Last. In the same year he wrote four papers in the same sense in Fraser's Magazine, then edited by J. A. Froude ; but he in turn was compelled to suspend the issue. They were completed and ultimately issued under the title Munera Pulveris. These two small books contain the earliest and most systematic of all Ruskin's efforts to depict a new social Utopia. They contain a vehement repudiation of the orthodox formulas of the economists ; and they are for the most part written in a trenchant but simple style, in striking contrast to the florid and discursive form of his works on art.
In 1864 Ruskin's father died, at the age of 79, leaving his son a large fortune and a fine property at Denmark Hill. John still lived there with his mother, aged 83, infirm, and failing in sight, to whom came as a companion his cousin, Joanna Ruskin Agnew, afterwards Mrs. Arthur Severn. At the end of the year 1864 Ruskin delivered at Manchester a new series of lectures—not on art, but on reading, education, woman's work and social morals— the expansion of his earlier treatises on economic sophisms. This afterwards was included with a Dublin lecture of 1868 under the fantastic title of Sesame and Lilies (perhaps the most popular of his social essays), of which 44,000 copies were issued down to 190o. He made this, in 1871, the first volume of his collected lectures and essays, the more popular and didactic form of his new Utopia of human life. It contains, with Fors, the most complete sketch of his conception of the place of woman in modern society.