Modern Painters (1843–1860) is a five-volume work by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, begun when he was 24 years old based on material collected in Switzerland in 1842.
[1] Ruskin argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters.
Ruskin used the book to argue that art should devote itself to the accurate documentation of nature.
In this way, Modern Painters reflects "Landscape and Portrait-Painting" (1829) in The Yankee by American art critic John Neal by distinguishing between "things seen by the artist" and "things as they are".
The fifth volume marked the end of the formational and important part of Ruskin's life in which his father had a great influence.