“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.”

English writer and art critic

John Ruskin was an English Victorian polymath, active as a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman, and philanthropist. He is known for the breadth of his work and for the many fields he wrote about. His writing ranged across art and architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth. That range made him an unusually wide-ranging public intellectual, with work that moved freely between the arts and the natural world.