"'Accustomed to Nature'". Ruskin's Rhetoric of Landscape Painting in Modern Painters I".

In this paper I consider some of the assumptions that John Ruskin’s landscape aesthetics shares with Romanticism, focussing in particular on the first volume of his 5-volume work Modern Painters. This volume is the one of his treatise on landscape painting that bears consistent and acknowledged debt to Wordsworth. I first touch upon some notions of Ruskin’s aesthetics, such as familiarity, custom, and variety, and subsequently provide an analysis of a descriptive passage of Turner’s painting, which I see as the enactment of Ruskin’s theoretical statements.