in four days time on Friday Ruskin will be 200 years old it has to be said that he hasn't aged very well at least in popular culture to judge by the characterizations of Ruskin in those 2014 films Mike Lee's mr. Turner where he appears simply as a rather lib fault and indeed ever Thompson's Effie gray film but this is a talk about one of England's greatest and most versatile writers and it's really difficult to know where to start in celebrating Ruskin's achievements because the range and quality of his writings and interest were phenomenal and I've read a fairly small proportion of those 39 volumes that comprises his complete works and I've chosen to concentrate on his art criticism because it's for that that perhaps he's best known these days perversely for a birthday talk I'm going to start at the end of his life on 20th of January 1900 the 80 year old John Ruskin died peacefully in his bedroom at Brant would his Lake District home overlooking Coniston water he had been virtually completely silent for the last decade of his life his mind was broken he wrote hardly anything and he just stayed and received the occasional visitor in that bedroom his beloved Turner paintings hung on the walls around him some years before he had said when I die I hope that they may be the last things my I will rest on in this world and so they were there are two paintings on these walls that I want to pick out and they're really the starting and finishing points of my talk the first is a watercolor of conwy castle they're on the left in North Wales painted in the 1790s by Ruskin's father John James Ruskin the other is a late Turner watercolor of the pass of Fido in Switzerland there's half a century between the conwy castle and the Fido paintings and they seem to belong to very different traditions Ruskin was brought up in the first as critic and practitioner and he helped to prepare the way for the second but first a little biography John Ruskin was born in London on the 8th of February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street Brunswick square here is the three-year-old John in a portrait by James Northcott then in his 70s the old painter asked his subject what he would like in the background blue hills said the child and it turned out to be a prophetic request Ruskin spent much of his career trying to bring Mountain glory into what he felt to be the visually impoverished environment slowly building up around the Victorians his father John James Ruskin was partner in the flourishing wine importing firm Ruskin Telford and Domecq the latter with vineyards in Spain when John James died in 1864 he bequeathed to his only son his only child John the equivalent in today's money of some 13 million or more in 1823 the family moved south to Herne Hill near Dodge village to a much larger house John lived there with his parents for 20 years and then inherited it to the end of his life he kept the Attic nursery as his bedroom when he was in London the Herne Hill garden was according to Ruskin renowned all over the hill for its pears and apples the garden was indeed Ruskin's first taste of an earthly paradise though taste may not be quite the right word here's Ruskin reminiscing the differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature of this garden and that of Eden as I had imagined it were that in this one all the fruit was forbidden and there were no companionable beasts these strictures are comically expressed but their effects resonated rather sombrely throughout Ruskin's life his mother had an austere sense of religious discipline he was allowed very few toys and had no play fellows here are some of his later reflections on this upbringing the law was that I should find my own amusement I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet examining the knots in the wood of the floor or counting the bricks in the opposite houses the carpet and what patterns I could find in bed covers dresses or wallpapers to be examined with my chief resources I'm quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very little things and to remain long contented with them not only in great part formed the power of close analysis in my mind and the habit of steady contemplation but render the power of Greater art over me when I first saw it as intense as that of magic so that it appealed to me like a vision out of another world Ruskin acknowledged some of the benefits of this austere regime of deprivation he wrote later I believe that quiet and the withdrawal of objects likely to distract by I'm using the child so as to let it fix its attention undisturbed on every lease thing in its domain is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of thought and he liked to quote the compliment paid to him by the Italian politician and writer Matt Seany that Ruskin possessed quote the most analytical mind in Europe it was this formidable analytical mind anyway that he brought to bear in the criticism of paintings these powers were reinforced by his extensive knowledge of geology and botany also by his own practice as an artist particularly in the rendering of fine delicate detail as in these examples Ruskin's are the gift major gift complemented his analytical brilliance and this was his imagination his ability to project his mind into other worlds his rich imagination was nourished by his childhood reading of walter scott's romances as well as homers epics and robinson crusoe from his father's reading aloud he also absorbed Byron's tales and passages from Shakespeare the child was required to read aloud from the Bible everyday by his mother and memorize whole books from the Bible a habit that influenced the organ music of his own prose his father was also a gifted storyteller sort of improvising storyteller and Ruskin remembered vividly one particular routine his father used to shave in the mornings at his dressing table beside the dressing table hung his little watercolor of conwy castle child John would stand close by watching to entertained his son John James would invent stories about this picture Ruskin recalled as follows the custom began without any initial purpose of his in consequence of my troublesome curiosity whether the fisherman lived in the cottage and where he was going to in the boat it being settled for peace sake that he did live in the cottage and was going in the boat to fish near the castle the plot of the drama afterwards gradually thickened and became I believe involved with that of a couple of popular romantic and gothic dramas thus Ruskin developed his remarkable combination of imaginative and analytical powers remarkable because most people aren't as so highly gifted with both Ruskin had the imaginative resources to unfold an elaborately dramatic story from very simple data indeed in a painting and the ability to observe significant detail however small and make it tell the exercise of these powers together with a passionate nature and a voluptuous Lee beautiful style of writing made him the most distinctive and penetrating art critic of the Victorian period that passionate nature burnt with the religious fervor Ruskin had a theory the Gothic architecture at its best expressed in his love of natural forms the profound and joyous devotional impulses of the medieval craftsman and for them that for them the love of nature was the love of God's creation it was this idealized belief in the medieval craftsmen's spontaneous joy in his work that fired Ruskin's later attacks on 19th century capitalism and the way it forced the factory worker to become a machine the Renaissance revival of interest in the art architecture and culture of the pagan Classical period entailed in Ruskin's you relapsed into hedonism his word into I quote over sophistication and ignorant classical ISM hence partly his championing of the pre-raphaelites painters who tried to revive the art of the pre Renaissance and its celebration of simple nature in luminous detail so what happened to that religious impulse that was there in the Gothic artists love of nature's forms according to Ruskin that impulse turned to landscape painting and has worked gradually up into Turner as he wrote landscape art in the modern world became the focus for religious feeling about nature and that's why for Ruskin Turner's landscape work comes to have a spiritual force however he had the task of persuading the British art establishment of this and they were still in thrall to older classical models of landscape beauty in the paintings of Claude Laurent and the Poussin's Ruskin launches his crusade in Modern Painters first volume 1843 and that work came out in five volumes over 17 years and it one starts to wander all over the place over these years Ruskin defended Turner's later and more controversial work by trying to expose the artifice and the theatricality of those older masters of landscape and he hoped thereby to persuade the establishment of Turner's revolutionary visions of the natural world in his preface to the second edition of Volume one of modern painters 1844 the preface that is the second edition he sets about an atomizing what he calls one of the ideal landscape compositions of Claude the painting he chose was and indeed still is in London's National Gallery and it's known as the mill or the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and here is Ruskin's description the foreground is a piece of very lovely and perfect forest scenery with the dance of peasants by a Brookside on the other side of the brook however we have a piece of pastoral life a man with some bulls and goats tumbling headforemost into the water owing to some sudden peril affection of all their legs even this group is one too many the Shepherd had no business to drive his flock so near the dancers and the dancers will certainly frighten the cattle but when we look farther into the picture our feelings receive a sudden and violent shock by the unexpected appearance amidst things pastoral a musical of the military a number of Roman soldiers riding in on hobby horses with the leader on foot apparently encouraging them to make an immediate and decisive charge on the musicians beyond the soldiers is a circular temple in exceedingly bad repair and close beside it built against its very walls and neat water mill in full work by the mill flows a large river with a we're all across it the wear has not been made for the mill for that receives its water from the hills by a trough carried over the temple but it is particularly ugly and monotonous in his line of fall and the water below forms a dead looking pond on which some people are fishing in pumps at an inconvenient distance from the waterside stands a city composed of 25 round towers and a pyramid beyond the city is a handsome bridge beyond the bridge part of the Campania with fragments of aqueducts beyond the Campania the chain of the Alps on the left the cascades of Tivoli this I believe is a fair example of what is commonly called an ideal landscape ie a group of artists studies from nature individually spoiled selected with such opposition of character as may ensure they're neutralizing each others affect and United with sufficient unnaturalness and violence of association to ensure they're producing a general sensation of the impossible his main criticism is that claude spoils a naturally beautiful landscape not only by inept figure drawing of animals but by filling the scene with discordant activities and buildings that don't make sense in their relationship with the landscape above all claude misrepresents the truth of the Campania landscape its extraordinary atmosphere its desolate natural drama at its site as the graveyard of history so here instead is Ruskin's evocative description of the actual scene his trademark word painting perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campania of Rome under evening light let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plane the earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot tread he never so lightly for its substance is white Hollow and Carius like the dusty wreck of the bones of men the long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight hillocks of moldering earth heave around him as if the dead beneath was struggling in their sleep scattered blocks of black stone for square remnants of mighty edifices not one left upon another lie upon them to keep them down a doll purple poisonous haze stretches level across the desert veiling its spectral wrecks of messy ruins on whose rents the red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars the Blue Ridge of the alban mount lifts itself against the solemn space of green clear quiet sky watchtowers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontory zuv the Apennines from the plane to the mountains the shattered aqueducts pier upon pier melt into the darkness like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners passing from a nation's grave it's a magnificent topographical portrait but is it one that could ever be adequately rendered in pigment certainly not by Claude I think Thomas Cole's Roman companion of 1843 actually comes fairly close I had hoped it might have been painted the year after that he might have read Ruskin's prose and decided to portray that but Ruskin's Campania is alive with subtle movement the earth softly crumbling and heaving in mounds the grass is waving in the evening wind the shadows playing on the ruins and these effects are enriched in his writing by simile something that painting can't do the earth is like the crumbling bones of men the sunset rests on the massive ruins like dying fire on defiled altars the ruined aqueducts like a procession of funeral mourners and these analogies remind the reader viewer that this vast landscape is the casual cemetery of a mighty civilization how is the painter to infuse a landscape with these readings Claudia argues isn't interested in the true atmosphere of the site he's interested only in converting some of its features into an idealized stage set for incongruous human activities but now the end of this word painting comes Ruskin's manifesto for the crusading modern painters my purpose then in the present work is to demonstrate the utter falseness both of the facts and principles the imperfection of material and error of arrangement on which works such as these are based and to insist on the necessity as well as the dignity of an earnest faithful loving study of nature as she is Ruskin is a highly polemical writer Modern Painters was launched after he had drafted a long letter in defense of Turner letter was never actually published that was in the early 1840s in the following decade now with an authoritative reputation he went to the public defense of other then avant-garde painters in 1851 he wrote a letter to The Times applauding what he called the uncompromising truth to nature the new and much abused pre-raphaelites cool then two years later The Times carried another Ruskin letter 25th of May 1854 this time with his explication of Holman hunts painting awakening conscience a painting that had left many viewers perplexed some wondering if it was a portrait of a brother and sister having a quarrel here's part of Ruskin's letter and listen how he deploys those gifts from childhood of acute observation of detail and vivid storytelling the poor girl has been singing with her seducer some chants words of the song oft in the stilly night have struck upon the numbed places of her heart she has started up in agony he not seeing her face goes on singing striking the keys carelessly with his gloved hand nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects forced themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement they thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness as if they would compel the sufferer to count or measure or learn them by heart even to the mere spectator a strange interest exalts the accessories of a scene in which he bears witness to human sorrow there is not a single object in all that room common modern vulgar but it becomes tragical if rightly read I'll just move it into some details you'll see incidentally the ringed fingers except for the crucial finger which is unring of the girl that furniture he goes on so carefully painted even to the last vein of the rosewood is there nothing to be learned from that terrible luster of it from its fatal newness nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it or that is ever to become a part of home the torn and dying bird upon the floor yeah notice how I put this in negative beside the cats you see it's the same predator cats facing negative the gilded tapestry with the fowls of the air feeding on the ripened call the picture above the fireplace with its single drooping figure the woman taken in adultery nay the very hem of the poor girl's dress which the painter has labored so closely thread by thread has story in it if we think how soon the pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain her outcast foot failing in the street so the objects in the room become tragical if rightly read and every detail has story in it and this is Ruskin's distinctive technique as spectator critic he reads the painting as an unfolding narrative a text he builds a dynamic story from the static data from his absorption and analysis of the minut details he's activating that childhood legacy the patient roaming penetrating eye for detail and the vitality of the creative imagination all this in the service of interpreting and championing what was then the shock of the new Ruskin was becoming the consummate word painter later in his life he regretted what he felt was the affected language in his words of Modern Painters and he wrote it is the chief provocation of my life to be called a word painter instead of a thinker so I am committing a sin titling the lecture there but some of his set-piece word paintings in those passages he rivals even the late Turner in textual equivalence to the gorgeous extravagance of the painters image making one of his most famous descriptive passages was his rendering of Turner's 1840 C piece the slave ship the story here is that the slave ship captain has ordered over a hundred slaves to be thrown overboard before the ship drives into the storm so that he can collect the insurance Ruskin said of this painting if I were reduced to rest turn as immortality upon any single work I should choose this and here's his description in modern painters illustrating Turner's genius for representing the truth of water it is a sunset on Atlantic after prolonged storm but the storm is partially lulled and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night the whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell not high nor local but a low broad heaving of the whole ocean like the lifting of its bosom by deep drawn breath after the torture of the storm between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea dying it with an awful but glorious light the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood along this fiery path and Valley the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided lifts themselves in dark indefinite fantastic forms each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam they do not rise everywhere but three or four together in wild groups fitfully and furiously as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water now lighted with green and lamp like fire now flashing back the gold of the declining Sun now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying purple and blue the nourish shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night which gathers cold and low advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it Labor's amidst the lightning of the sea it's thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood you hear perhaps what I mean by the organ music of his prose when it really lifts itself to this this kind of level of eulogy Ruskin owned this painting Turner found it difficult to sell Ruskin bought it kept it with him for a number of years and then became so frightened by looking at it so pulled by what it was saying that he sold it and it went to a collector in America in 1872 and was exhibited in New York there and is in the Boston Art Museum one of those who saw it soon after it arrived in America was Mark Twain and he writes something a little bit later in a book called a abroad about the way in which his eyes were apparently opened to the slave ship by Ruskin's description which he read sometime afterwards after he'd formed his first opinions so here is Mark Twain what a red rag is through a bull turn a slave ship was to me before I studied art mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into his mad and ecstasy of pleasure as he used to throw me into one of rage last year when I was ignorant his cultivation enables him and me now to see water in that glaring yellow mud and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame and crimson sunset glories it reconciles him and me now to the floating of iron cable chains and other unflappable things it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud I mean the water though most of the picture is a manifesting possibility that is to say a lie and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie but it enabled mr. Ruskin to do it and it has enabled me to do it and I'm thankful for it a Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the slave ship floundering around in that fierce configure of reds and yellows and said it reminded him of a tortoiseshell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes in my then uneducated state that went home to mine on cultivation and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye mr. Ruskin would have said this person is an ass that is what I would say now as usual there's a mischievous ambivalence here about whether or not Twain is really won over by the exercise of what he calls Ruskin's cultivation by the mid-century rust compared to become art Tudor to the nation the grand explicator of visual narrative and I think might pause of this bicentenary moment to reflect more generally on the role of an art critic particularly in relation to Ruskin sense and performance of his role what do we expect of the person who is offering to mediate a work of art for us among other things we expect him or her to introduce the work contextualize it interpret it perhaps challenge our prejudices and offer value judgments on it by and large these days we don't expect that person verbally to reproduce the content of paintings in long descriptive paragraphs law to urge radical changes to a society's cultural values in general outlook and yet that became the character Ruskin's critical writing a society's art and architecture was the expression of its culture so an art critic for Ruskin was inevitably a social critic and analyst few people I think read Ruskin these days so we might well wonder what use his art criticism is for us let me suggest just one of a number of things we might profit from in returning to Ruskin bearing in mind some of the things that I've read this one thing is am I called slow art appreciation slow art appreciation how long do you spend in front of the painting to let it work on you according to some museum research surveys we spend on average between seventeen and thirty two point five seconds looking at a picture in a gallery a Louvre study found that people looked at Mona Lisa for an average of fifteen seconds much of that looking is often with a camera rather than the eye with our dwindling attention spans and increasing compulsion to photographing galleries we're in danger of seeing only what the camera sees once the camera clicks it loses interest in its subject it then moves on and takes his handler with it we seem in a hurry but when we come to Ruskin's criticism we spend a long time with the landscape painting as my lengthy quotations would have shown with this prolonged attention to the picture we homed in on details we might otherwise have neglected objects they're slowly acquire an extra glow with highlighted significance new currents of understandings start to circulate a compelling narrative stirs into action and maybe spreads beyond the frame the light within the picture starts to bathe the viewer ruskin awakens our senses to the life in that two-dimensional rectangle of pigments sight is spiritual as well as physical he wrote site depends on the soul it takes time and attention to let site access soul in gazing at a painting cameras don't have souls Thomas Hardy wrote of turn later landscapes each is a landscape plus a man's soul we don't use the word soul quite so much as the Victorians did but it's very forcefully used in Ruskin what Ruskin can give us today is much the same as what he gave to his fellow Victorians for whom the rush of modern life was just beginning charlotte brontë was sent a copy of Modern Painters by her publisher here's what she wrote in a letter of 31st of July 1848 hitherto I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art I feel now as if I had been walking blind fold this book seems to give me eyes I do wish I had pictures within reach by which to test the new sense who can read these glowing descriptions of Turner's works without longing to see them I like this author's style much there is both energy and beauty in it I like himself too because he is such a hearty and Myra he does not give himself half measure of praise or vituperation he eulogizes he reverences with his whole soul in the last part of this lecture I return to that late Turner watercolor that hung in Ruskin's bedroom to the end and this will be a way of illustrating I hope how with Ruskin the story in a painting and its emotional charge can spill out of its frame and into your life I shall cover this slightly obliquely John Britt's painting Val d'Aosta was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 it came in for some harsh criticism milller considered the painting I quote a wretched work like a photograph Ruskin was somewhat embarrassed by it since he had encouraged Brett to paint that very subject had taken to heart Ruskin's call for landscape artists to represent nature with loving truth to the details of God's creation but he'd been unable to incorporate another kind of truth truth in art Ruskin wrote a quote signifies the faithful statement either to the mind or senses of any fact of nature truth is different from imitation though a quote imitation can only be of something material but truth has referenced two statements both of the qualities of material things and of emotions impressions and thoughts there is a truth of impression as well as of form Ruskin confused the truth issue by spending hundreds of pages in Modern Painters non detailed descriptions and analyses of the geological anatomy of mountains as well as the physical truth of water clouds vegetation and so on so Bret must have assumed that he was carrying out Ruskin's program from the meticulously detailed lichen on the foreground rocks through the valley terraces and different tree species to the folds and peaks of the mountains here is what Ruskin wrote of the painting of owl Dale Stowe yes here we have it at last some clothes coming to it at least historical landscape properly so-called landscape painting with a meaning and a use standing before this picture is just as good as standing on that spot in Valdosta so far as gaining knowledge is concerned he goes on to praise at length brett scrupulous rendering of detail his dedication to representing the truth of that particular landscape but then come the reservations it has a strange fault it seems to me wholly emotionless I cannot find from it that the painter loved or feared anything in all that wonderful piece of the world there seems to me no or of the mountains there no real love of the chestnuts or the vines I never saw the mirror so held up to nature but it is mirrors work not man's historical landscape it is unquestionably meteorological also poetical by no means almost in proportion to its fidelity to the objectively observable Alpine Valley Bret's landscape lacks expressive emotional force it's a dehumanized response it fails by Ruskin's criterion of truth in art that a landscape painting should transmit a truth of form but also a truth of emotional impact how though is the latter to be expressed this brings us to the picture on the bedroom wall Turner's 1843 color watercolor the pass of Fido his subject was a narrow defile below the 7,000 foot highs and Guittard Pass Ruskin commissioned this painting and he referred to it as a quote the greatest work he Turner produced in the last period of his art two years later Ruskin made his own journey to the Alps in search of the path of Fido to study the sight of Turner's watercolor I must see its actual scene he wrote to his father that I may know what is composition and what his Verity he found the site a few miles below the village of ro lo by the river to Chino and wrote to his father the stones road and bridge all true but the mountains compared with Turner's colossal conception looked pygmy and poor while at the site he made this ink and watercolor sketch the sketch was designed to record the actual topography so as to demonstrate what Turner had done to transform the scene about ten years later Ruskin used one of these sketches as a basis for a drawing itched illustration 2 volume 4 of Modern Painters where he undertakes an extended analysis of Turner's treatment of the mountain landscape the argument here is essentially the Turner's expressive art has given a different kind of truth to the mountain view and in Ruskin's mind a superior truth and here's his description there is nothing in this scene taken by itself particularly interesting or impressive the mountains are not elevated nor particularly fine informed and the heaps of stones which encumber the Chi Chi no present nothing notable to the ordinary eye but in reality the place is approached through one of the narrowest and most sublime ravines in the Alps and after the traveler during the early part of the day has been familiarized with the aspect of the highest peaks of the Monson guitar hence it speaks quite another language to him from that in which it would address itself to an unprepared spectator the confused sones which by themselves would be almost without any claim upon his thoughts become exponents of the fury of the river by which he has journeyed all day long the defiled beyond not in itself narrow terrible is regarded nevertheless with awe because it is imagined to resemble the gorge that had just been traversed above and although no very elevated mountains immediately overhang it the scene is felt to belong to and arise in its essential character out of the strength of those mightier mountains of the unseen north any topographical delineation of these facts therefore must be wholly incapable of arousing in the mind of the beholder those sensations which would be caused by the facts themselves seen in their natural relations to others and the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher truth of mental vision rather than that of physical facts and to reach a representation which though it may be totally useless to injured or geographers and when tried by ruler measure totally unlike the place shall yet be capable of producing on the faraway beholders mind precisely the impression which the reality would have produced and putting his heart into the same state in which it would have been had he verily descended into the valley from the gorges of Iroh no Ruskin argues that the mental or emotional truth of this mountain view is one that needs to distort the topography in order to communicate the contextual drama of the larger experience of the whole environment this is truth to the human experience of the scene and not just a photographic record of the spot and Ruskin's art criticism has intervened again and again to register the human experience the painter has to represent the single scene in such a way that it triggers a more extended emotional narrative those huge heaps of stone for instance lying in the river Ruskin is telling us that their history is powerfully exciting they've been told from the mountaintops by the turbulent River or by winter avalanches and are temporarily arrested in their passage so too of course is the traveler who has arrived after a passage down through the peaks of sand Guittard the carriage is there to remind us of this Turner was criticized for introducing it at all the carriage because it destroyed the majesty of desolation in his picture not so said Ruskin the quote the full essence and soul of the scene and consummation of all the wonderfulness of the torrents and the Alps lay in that post-chaise because without the suggestion of the human element nature loses in the instant its power over the human heart the 20th century Cornish painter Peter Lanyon once remarked when the spectator is drawn to the horizon through a vortex of spatial forms and paintings by Turner there is some physical participation the subject of the picture begins to be the person looking at it we use the word absorbing casually to mean that our attention is taken by something but absorbed means literally sucked in by and how apt Turner transforms static two-dimensional typography into molten movement this is living nature constantly changing and human life the human element so precious to Ruskin is a part of that narrative swept up in absorbed into the tumultuous processes this is one of the most valuable lessons I think the Ruskin's distinctive word painting mode of art criticism teaches there is no critic like him he stirs up our imaginative engagement with the picture and this combined with his extraordinary eye for salient detail and with the evocative power of his language helps to release the energy caged within the formal frame of the landscape picture as Charlotte brontë said Ruskin seems to give us eyes [Applause] you