The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics

Abstract

Despite John Ruskin's vehement condemnation of it in some places, his work is indebted to earlier writers on the Picturesque, and in general terms his work can be understood to be a development of picturesque sensibility. But it is also the case that our image of the picturesque is to a large extent one received through Ruskin. To the extent that we think of the Picturesque as a general aesthetic concept rather than one particular to its Eighteenth Century inventors, it is in Ruskin's condemnation of the Picturesque that the concept is completed. Ruskin tells us that the Picturesque is a kind facile preoccupation with visual qualities which blind the weak minded to human suffering. The picturesque leads to unseemly interests and Ruskin's disgust at picturesqueness is an exact parallel to the picturesque viewer's having forgotten to be disgusted. There are two interesting aspects to this paradoxical denunciation. The first is that it is an unacknowledged reiteration of the problem of conceptualizing disgust which is fundamental to eighteenth century Picturesque theory. Second, for Ruskin to repeat the problematic of disgust as if it were an aspect of his historical distance from the picturesque (rather than an integral part of the picturesque thematic) is, in a strange way, a development of the eighteenth century picturesque. Ruskin's use of the Picturesque as a kind of hors d'oeuvre to his own project completes the Picturesque, gives it the temporal mechanism by which this rather slight theory of rural genre painting could become a general aesthetic principle.