John Ruskin, the English critic of art and society, was born in London, the son of a wine merchant. He began writing while at Oxford and in 1843 published, in London, the first volume of Modern Painters, four more volumes of which were published during the next sixteen years. In 1849 he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and between 1851 and 1853 The Stones of Venice (3 vols.). The major part of his work as a young man was criticism of art and architecture, and his subsequent ethical and social writing grew from this root. The beginnings of this important extension of his range can be seen in the famous chapter "The Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice; the important connection established there, between art and "the right kind of labour," is developed in The Political Economy of Art (printed as A Joy for Ever, 1857), Unto...