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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:
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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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De Botton suggests one important mechanism that translates the experience of observing beauty into the incorporation of that beauty into oneself, or what John Ruskin called the “transfer of goodness from without to within.” Clearly, this is an essential part of travel because it determines whether people can truly learn and benefit from the things they see abroad. And, throughout The Art of Travel, this metaphorical ingestion of beauty must be psychological: Wordsworth’s moments in nature are valuable because he preserves them as spots of time, encounters with the sublime help people overcome their troubles only if they can remember Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et.
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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If the question of how to “eat” a place (or retain the beauty of a place after encountering it) is so central to de Botton’s quest to make the reader a better traveler, then photography is a true danger to the search for happiness through travel. This is not because it necessarily prevents people from seeing beauty—Ruskin, after all, liked to make daguerrotypes (an early kind of photograph), and if observers pay close attention to their photographs as art works, they may have to notice the details in the frame before capturing them with a camera. But, whereas truly capturing Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore i
“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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Ruskin has no great desire to create better artists through his classes; rather, he wants to create happier people who know how to observe their environment, a mission that closely parallels de Botton’s in this book. Ruskin teaches drawing because he recognizes that learning to draw can teach people to see, but his ultimate goal is to “teach the looking at nature.” As with Wordsworth and de Botton’s theorists of the sublime, nature seems to hold the ultimate key to beauty and happiness: for Ruskin, it lies in visual details’ effect on the observer, and so drawing is valuable because Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Providen
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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Ruskin argues that drawing is an invaluable corrective to people’s usual failure to look: they become complacent and bored with their familiar lives, and so they do not even seek out the details and experiences that might cure their boredom. Just as Flaubert thought that people should choose what is familiar and foreign to them, here Ruskin suggests that familiarity is more a set of expectations and preferences than a quality of any particular place: being familiar somewhere merely means expecting (and so refusing to see) anything new there. But Ruskin and de Botton think that a receptivity to the Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserunt. Sint aperiam consequatur. Minima porro perferendis. Sit neque odit. Tenetur qui dignissimos. Qui et ut. Voluptate labore corporis. Hic tempore laborum. Nisi quia ea. Quia so
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John Ruskin Character Timeline in The Art of Travel
The timeline below shows where the character John Ruskin appears in The Art of Travel. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8: On Possessing Beauty
John Ruskin, born in 1819 in London, focused largely on this question of how to possess places’...
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Ruskin’s preoccupation from 1856 until 1860 was teaching drawing, which he found more important (and more...
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Ruskin believed drawing was productive for people regardless of their talent because it taught them “to...
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Ruskin shouted down a group of Manchester industrialists in 1864, accusing their railroads of trying to...
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Ruskin saw drawing as the outgrowth of a human instinct—like eating and drinking, it was based...
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Following Ruskin, de Botton decides to try drawing. He tries to draw the window of his bedroom...
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Ruskin summarized his mission as an attempt to “direct people’s attention accurately to the beauty of...
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Ruskin wanted people to not only draw but also “word-paint.” De Botton notes that people often...
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Ruskin’s word-paintings were about places’ psychological effects as much as their aesthetic qualities. He personified clouds,...
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De Botton concludes that, despite his word-paintings’ middling quality, he nevertheless pursued Ruskin’s two goals for art: “to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of...
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