Pictures Exchanged for Windows: Ruskin, Dilke, and Social History of Symbols

In a notorious chapter of Modern Painters “On the Use of Pictures”, John Ruskin asserts that “any sensible person would exchange his pictures, however good, for windows” on the same scene, the goal of art being not pleasure but truth. Though easy to ridicule, Ruskin’s thought is a stark statement of “art history as social science” (his words, in a letter to his student Emily Patterson, later Lady Dilke). Taken as a guide to commodity production, public institutions and audiences, art becomes, if not replaceable, then primarily of interest as an opening on aspects of the real world not otherwise accessible to inquiry. It is a Ruskinian window, even if the nature it discloses is urban, industrialized human nature. Sophisticated social historians strive, therefore, to balance such instrumentalism by a kind of conditional autonomy, allowing art to intervene and not merely reflect the world. This involves the tricky study of the history of meaning, in other words of the construction and interpretation of symbols. Here again Ruskin, and his aestheticist critics Pater, Whistler, and especially Pattison/Dilke, are of interest: for as Ruskin noted in the passage quoted above, the exchange of pictures for windows is not of equal but of incommensurate goods. The ordering of facts in a “language of symbols”, as Pattison puts it, is itself a historical fact to which English Victorian art historians attended. Their thinking about the conceptual use of artworks, whether social, political, or abstractly philosophical, is indispensable to the critical art historian.