February 8, 1819

John Ruskin (February 8,  1819 to January 20, 1900) was the leading Victorian art critic, and may be said to have invented, not the idea of art criticism, but the exalting of the art critic as a critical aspect of the world of art. Praeterita (1885-1889 ) is the title of his memoirs. Here we learn that a cat is one thing he could not draw from memory, when a child. I fill out our sense of Ruskin with two quotes which give us a  picture of this intellectual.

Here we learn of his childhood home:

When I was about four years old my father found himself able to buy the lease of a house on Herne Hill, a rustic eminence four miles south of the ‘Standard in Cornhill’; of which the leafy seclusion remains, in all essential points of character, unchanged to this day: certain Gothic splendours, lately indulged in by our wealthier neighbours, being the only serious innovations; and these are so graciously concealed by the fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled by them; and I can still walk up and down the piece of road between the Fox tavern and the Herne Hill station, imagining myself four years old....

and his mother:

My mother, herself finding her chief personal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. I never thought of doing anything behind her back which I would not have done before her face; and her presence was therefore no restraint to me; but, also, no particular pleasure, for, from having always been left so much alone, I had generally my own little affairs to see after; and, on the whole, by the time I was seven years old, was already getting too independent, mentally, even of my father and mother; and, having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which it appeared to me, (as it must naturally appear to geometrical animals,) that I occupied in the universe.

This may explain both his ignorance and his  originality.