The Rose and the Worm

Imaginative Realism and Time in Ruskin’s Turner

Abstract

John Ruskin does not make much use of the term ‘realism’ to describe J. M. W. Turner’s art in Modern Painters (1843–1860) but in The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), looking back over his earlier, sprawling, five-volume treatise, Ruskin says that his work there revealed Turner to have been a ‘realist’. Avoiding broader histories of that most nineteenth century of art terms, this essay begins by taking Ruskin at his word. Close readings of the passages on Turner in Modern Painters will show how there is indeed a kind of nascent realism being theorised by Ruskin, one that includes but extends beyond the well-trodden territories of industrialisation, and social and environmental tumult. The essay will show how there are two main, intertwined strands of Ruskin’s examination of Turner’s imaginative realism, the phenomenological and the ecological. Temporality overarches and frames Ruskin’s analysis in Modern Painters in ways that shed light on realism’s fundamental procedures as an attitude in art practice and art criticism. In particular, the essay considers how Ruskin’s emerging concept of realism negotiates individual and collective memory. In doing so, the essay offers up implications that might be taken into a thorough re-evaluation of the history of nineteenth-century painting in Britain in relation to the emerging art term ‘realism’ and its use by one of the period’s most prominent art writers.