England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste

John Ruskin, David Carrier, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes

Psychology Press, 1997 - Art - 126 pages

A lively and provocative account of the arts in Britain, Building Jerusalem suggests that even after fifty years of state planning of Britain's "leisure industries" the country is nevertheless approaching the millennium in a state of cultural confusion. Drawing on a wealth of historical material from Scotland, Wales, and English provincial towns, as well as the more familiar London story, Pick and Anderton contend that the original meaning of cultural language has been distorted by the fashionable phrase-making of modern government agencies, and by the inaccurate and misleading view of cultural history that is constantly presented to the public.

The authors unfold fascinating stories of Britain's cultural past, before state support of the arts. They vividly relate the great changes wrought by the industrial revolution and by the development of the twentieth century media and describe the long history of Church and Royal support for the arts, as well as the long periods when all of the arts

Contents

• Essays by John Ruskin Walter Pater and Adrian Stokes: 25
• Notes: 119
• Bibliography: 125

About the author

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 - 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political economy. His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded by a preference for plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, and architectural structures and ornamentation.

David Carrier is Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of many books, including Principles of Art History Writing (1991), The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (1994), and High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting (1996), all from Penn State Press.

Harold Bloom is a distinguised literary critic and University Professor of the Humanities at Yale University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste; Critical Voices; Critical voices in art, theory and culture, ISSN 1025-9325
• Authors: John Ruskin, David Carrier, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes
• Publisher: Psychology Press, 1997
• ISBN: 9057012111, 9789057012112
• Length: 126 pages
• Subjects: Art / Criticism & Theory; Art / History / General