Audiobook · read by volunteers
Lectures on Landscape
John Ruskin (1819–1900)
Read by Hugh McGuire, Kirsten Ferreri, Duncan Murrell · 3 chapters · 1 h 45
About the book
In 1871 John Ruskin stood before an Oxford audience to talk about landscape painting, and these three lectures are the record of that occasion. Ruskin was never content to describe pictures from a distance. He wants his listeners to look: at the line that bounds a form, at the way light and shade model a hillside or a cloud, at the behaviour of colour in a painted scene and in nature itself. Each lecture takes one of these elements and examines how painters have handled it, praising some, scolding others, and always pressing for honest observation over convention. The prose is vigorous, opinionated and often beautiful. For anyone curious about how a great Victorian critic taught people to see, or simply about what makes a landscape work on canvas, this short series makes lively company.
Introduction
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was one of the most influential voices of Victorian England. An artist himself, he became better known as a critic, writing on painting, architecture and, later, on society and the economy. His books taught a generation of readers that looking carefully at nature and at works of art was a moral as well as an aesthetic exercise.
The lectures recorded here were delivered at Oxford in 1871, in the years when Ruskin held the university's chair of fine art. The subject is landscape painting, and the three talks are organised around three of its basic ingredients: outline, light and shade, and colour. In each, Ruskin moves between the practice of painters he admired or distrusted and the evidence of the natural world, insisting that a picture should be judged by its fidelity to what the eye really sees.
This LibriVox recording is a short one, about an hour and three quarters, shared among three volunteer readers. It suits anyone who enjoys the sound of nineteenth-century argument: long, rolling sentences, sudden flashes of wit, and a firm conviction that attention is a form of respect. Whether or not you share his taste, you will probably come away looking at the sky and at a painted sky a little differently. Because the lectures are brief and self-contained, they can be heard in a single afternoon. Anyone interested in painting, in Victorian ideas about art, or in the history of looking at the natural world will find plenty to think about in them.
Public domain
John Ruskin died in 1900: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text