Author(s): John Ruskin

Art

Modern Painters. Vol II "Of Ideas of Beauty," and "Of the Imaginative Faculty." 2 Vols

Modern Painters is a work by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, begun when he was 24 years old based on material collected in Switzerland in 1842. Ruskin argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters. The book was primarily written as a defense of the later work of J. M. W. Turner. Ruskin used the book to argue that art should devote itself to the accurate documentation of nature. In Ruskin's view, Turner had developed from early detailed documentation of nature to a later more profound insight into natural forces and atmospheric effects. In this way, Modern Painters reflects "Landscape and Portrait-Painting" (1829) in The Yankee by American art critic John Neal by distinguishing between "things seen by the artist" and "things as they are".

Vol II which itself comes in 2 volumes; vol i, pp xx, 360; vol ii, pp 248. Full cream calf with gilt borders, leather title label to spines. Marbled endpapers, gilt top page edge. Top corner cut from flyleaf. Some foxing to prelims, else very good. A handsome set.