Rose La Touche ( 1848 - 1875 ) is the main love in the life of John Ruskin .
| Rosa La Touche | |
|---|---|
| English Rose la touche | |
 Rosa La Touche, 1861, painting by John Ruskin | |
| Date of Birth | |
| Date of death | |
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Biography
Ruskin met Rosa when she was ten years old, and fell in love with her when she was eleven. She was an ardent child, and also deeply religious, almost to mania. The first impression of Ruskin about her was that she ... "walked like a small white statue through the twilight forest, talking seriously . " Her nickname for him was St. Crumpet. Ruskin invited her to marry him at seventeen. He was then fifty. Rosa did not refuse, but her pious parents, Protestants and evangelists , opposed the wedding, calling Ruskin a socialist and an atheist . They were also worried about the failure of Ruskin’s first marriage with Effie Gray , which ended in invalidating the union on the basis of Ruskin’s “incurable impotence ” (the diagnosis was later challenged).
The writer George MacDonald served as an intermediary for Ruskin and Rosa and was their closest friend and adviser. Ruskin repeated the marriage proposal when Rosa became legally free to decide on her own, but she again refused the marriage due to religious differences.
Rosa died in a Dublin private hospital in 1875 at the age of 27, where her parents placed her. Various authors describe her death as the result of insanity, anorexia , a broken heart, religious mania or hysteria, or a combination of these reasons. In any case, the death of Rosa was tragic, and it is she who is usually called the cause that entailed the beginning of the attacks of insanity at Ruskin around 1877 . He convinced himself that the Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio included the portraits of Roses in his cycle of paintings about the life of St. Ursula . He also sought solace in spiritualism , trying to get in touch with the spirit of Rosa.
The love story of Rosa and Ruskin is mentioned in Nabokov 's novel Lolita . According to Wolfgang Kemp, “all work is permeated with allusions and direct references to La Touche” [4] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Union List of Artist Names
- ↑ 1 2 Swartz A. Open Library - 2005.
- ↑ 1 2 SNAC - 2010.
- ↑ Kemp, Wolfgang. The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin . 1990. Pages 296-97
Literature
- Burd, Van Akin (Ed.) John Ruskin and Rose La Touche: Her Unpublished Diaries of 1861 and 1867 . Oxford University Press.
- The Portraits of Rose la Touche, James S. Dearden, The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 120, No. 899 (Feb., 1978), pp. 92–96
- Kemp, Wolfgang. The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin . 1990.
- Hilton, Tim. John Ruskin: The Later Years . Yale University Press, 2000.