The Desire of My Eyes

This “tour de force of analysis” examines the life and work of the prolific visionary English writer, painter, and critic (Joel Agee).

“This distinguished work, gracefully translated, is illustrated with portraits of the critic and drawings by him.” —Publishers Weekly

Tolstoy called him one of the greatest minds of any time or nation; Proust traced his spiritual rebirth to him; Gandhi tried to carry on his work in India, while Shaw and Morris did the same in England.

A writer, John Ruskin left behind thirty-eight volumes of collected works, not including diaries and correspondence; an artist, he produced thousands of drawings and watercolors; a traveler, he spent half his adult life outside his native country. Among his friends he counted the Brownings, Turner, Rosetti, Millais, and Burne-Jones. He drew large audiences to the lecture halls, and for years wrote and published his own monthly newsletter for the workers of Britain.

Seeing, and teaching others to see, was his primary concern. But the more he looked, the more he saw that the conditions for vision were themselves under threat, and so he evolved from seer to prophet, becoming, along with Carlyle and Marx, one of the most savage critics of the Victorian world. Art history and criticism now took second place to more urgent concerns: political economy, the preservations of nature and architecture, social reform.

With The Desire of My Eyes, first published in Germany in 1983, Wolfgang Kemp finds in Ruskin's life—which spanned the same years as Queen Victoria’s and thus embodied the Victorian era itself—a faithful mirror of the history and psychological evolution of his age.