John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy sherry merchant who became the leading art critic of the Victorian age with Modern Painters, in defence of Turner, and The Stones of Venice, on Gothic architecture as the expression of a free workman, and then turned, in Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera, against the political economy of the age and the ugliness it made. Sesame and Lilies, two lectures of 1864 on reading and on the education of women, was his most popular book and the one Proust translated. He was the first Slade professor at Oxford, gave away his fortune, went mad, and spent his last years silent at Brantwood.