Editing John Ruskin (section)

===Travel===
[[File:Rose Terrace, Perth.JPG|thumb|10 Rose Terrace, Perth (on the right), where Ruskin spent boyhood holidays with Scottish relatives|220x220px]]
Ruskin was greatly influenced by the extensive and privileged travels he enjoyed in his childhood. It helped to establish his taste and augmented his education. He sometimes accompanied his father on visits to business clients at their country houses, which exposed him to English landscapes, architecture and paintings. Family tours took them to the [[Lake District]] (his first long poem, ''Iteriad'', was an account of his tour in 1830)<ref>John Ruskin, ''Iteriad, or Three Weeks Among the Lakes'', ed. James S. Dearden (Frank Graham, 1969) {{page needed|date=August 2012}}</ref> and to relatives in [[Perth, Scotland|Perth]], Scotland. As early as 1825, the family visited [[France]] and [[Belgium]]. Their continental tours became increasingly ambitious in scope: in 1833 they visited [[Strasbourg]], [[Schaffhausen]], [[Milan]], [[Genoa]] and [[Turin]], places to which Ruskin frequently returned. He developed a lifelong love of the [[Alps]], and in 1835 visited [[Venice]] for the first time,<ref>[[Robert Hewison]], ''Ruskin and Venice: The Paradise of Cities'' (Yale University Press, 2009) {{page needed|date=August 2012}}</ref> that 'Paradise of cities' that provided the subject and symbolism of much of his later work.{{sfn|Cook and Wedderburn|loc=1.453n2}}

These tours gave Ruskin the opportunity to observe and record his impressions of nature. He composed elegant, though mainly conventional poetry, some of which was published in ''Friendship's Offering''.{{sfn|Cook and Wedderburn|loc=Introduction}} His early notebooks and sketchbooks are full of visually sophisticated and technically accomplished drawings of maps, landscapes and buildings, remarkable for a boy of his age. He was profoundly affected by [[Samuel Rogers]]'s poem ''Italy'' (1830), a copy of which was given to him as a 13th birthday present; in particular, he deeply admired the accompanying illustrations by [[J. M. W. Turner]]. Much of Ruskin's own art in the 1830s was in imitation of Turner, and of [[Samuel Prout]], whose ''Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany'' (1833) he also admired. His artistic skills were refined under the tutelage of Charles Runciman, [[Copley Fielding]] and [[James Duffield Harding|J. D. Harding]].