Elizabeth Eastlake v. John Ruskin: The Content of Idea and the Claims of Art

Elizabeth Eastlake's unsigned 1856 review of John Ruskin's "Modern Painters" appeared in the "Quarterly Review." Her text engages with Ruskin's insistence on the nullity of the painter's language except in its instrumental function as a vehicle of thought. She valorizes the painter's resources as distinct from the normally verbal medium of thought. Her thesis is that the only way to determine the ultimate value of art is by identifying "those qualities which no other art but itself can express, and which are therefore to be considered as 'proper' to it." She suggests that Ruskin's quarrel is with the language of art itself. To assert that thought should be understood as included in the artist's means is altogether extraordinary for the period.