Ruskin 's principle engagement in Modern Painters I from the point of view of aesthetics, is with Reynolds (although see also Ruskin and Burke). The reputation of Reynolds's Discourses effectively stood in the way of his defence of Turner, as he wished to appeal to Turner's truth to nature, particularly as regards detail - something of which Reynolds disapproved (see Ruskin and Reynolds).
Ruskin 's aesthetic as put forward in Modern Painters I might be thought of as a celebration of detail - this is certainly how the critical reception of Modern Painters I seemed to understand his work. As such it polarised opinion along political lines: the conservative critics finding fault with his approach and progressive critics by and large championing it. As a distinct aesthetic, Modern Painters I, despite Ruskin's own complicated personal politics, is arguably broadly in keeping with the reform movement and as such a product of its revolutionary decade. Its interest in individualised detail in nature and art, and in the importance and authority of an individual's personal perceptions, parallels the rise of democratic accountability that followed the Reform Acts. Reynoldsian abstraction had been based upon the concept of Civic Virtue derived from the landed gentleman's capacity for disinterested thought (see Barrell, Political Theory of Painting). Modern Painters I argued that abstraction resulted in a distortion of the natural world, and was thus by extension an attack not only on the 'Ancient Masters' of painting, but upon the conceptual model of the landowning 'masters' of the old order.