RUSKIN

The recipient of this letter is Frederick Harris, identified by Cook and Wedderburn as a drawing master, who took a correspondence course from Ruskin. In 1879, Ruskin resigned from Oxford, but resumed his Professorship in 1883, only to resign again in 1884. He gave his reason as opposition to vivisection, but he had increasingly been in conflict with the University authorities, who refused to expand his Drawing School. redHe was also suffering from increasingly poor health.His last great work was his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89), a highly personalised, selective, eloquent but incomplete account of aspects of his life, the preface of which was written in his childhood nursery at Herne Hill. The period from the late 1880s was one of steady and inexorable decline. Gradually it became too difficult for him to travel to Europe. He suffered a complete mental collapse on his final tour, which included Beauvais, Sallanches and Venice, in 1888. The emergence and dominance of the Aesthetic movement and Impressionism distanced Ruskin from the modern art world, his ideas on the social utility of art contrasting with the doctrine of art for art's sake that was beginning to dominate. His later writings were increasingly seen as irrelevant.