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Vincent van Gogh
A 19th-century British thinker and critic famous for the drawing classes he offered to English commoners. During his privileged childhood, Ruskin’s parents cultivated his interest in art, but he believed that people of all social classes should learn to draw—not in order to become artists, but rather in order to learn how to truly see the world around them. He believed that, to truly possess the beauty one sees, one must come to understand what makes something beautiful. He argued that drawing and word-painting, unlike photography, made that understanding possible by forcing people to notice the details that compose larger wholes and pay sustained attention to the world around them. After reading Ruskin, Alain de Botton takes up drawing and word painting in his eighth essay.
John Ruskin Quotes in The Art of Travel
The The Art of Travel quotes below are all either spoken by John Ruskin or refer to John Ruskin. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, “I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”
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The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous. It suggests that we have done all the work simply by taking a photograph, whereas proper eating of a place—a woodland, for example—requires that we pose ourselves a series of questions such as “How do the stems connect to the roots?” “Where is the mist coming from?” “Why does one tree seem darker than another?” These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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“I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.”
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Chapter 9
Quotes
The reason people were not looking was that they had never done so before. They had fallen into the habit of considering their universe to be boring—and their universe had duly fallen into line with their expectations.
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John Ruskin Quotes in The Art of Travel
The The Art of Travel quotes below are all either spoken by John Ruskin or refer to John Ruskin. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, “I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous. It suggests that we have done all the work simply by taking a photograph, whereas proper eating of a place—a woodland, for example—requires that we pose ourselves a series of questions such as “How do the stems connect to the roots?” “Where is the mist coming from?” “Why does one tree seem darker than another?” These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9
Quotes
The reason people were not looking was that they had never done so before. They had fallen into the habit of considering their universe to be boring—and their universe had duly fallen into line with their expectations.
1111
