Modern Painters I had originally been turned down by the publisher John Murray who said, according to John James Ruskin (letter to W. H. Harrison, March 321, 1847), 'the public cared little about Turner, but strongly urged my son's writing on the German School, which the public were calling for works on' ( Works, 3.xxxii). Collingwood reports that Ruskin could not read German texts and gained some knowledge of German philosophy through 'those who have popularised the German philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel'; the first of which was Coleridge in his Essays on the Fine Arts. Collingwood also indicates that Ruskin's knowledge of the work of German philosophers and art theorists 'was of such fragmentary form that he was under no obligation to consider them in any sense his masters' (see, Collingwood, The Art Teaching of John Ruskin, p.15-6).
In an appendix to Modern Painters III (1856), Ruskin had confidently written under the heading of 'German Philosophy':
I never speak of German art, or German philosophy, but in depreciation. This, however, is not because I cannot feel, or would not acknowledge, the value and power, within certain limits, of both; but because I also feel that the immediate tendency of the English mind is to rate them too highly; and therefore, it becomes a necessary task, at present, to mark what evil and weakness there are in them, rather than what good. I also am brought continually into collision with certain extravagances of the German mind, by my own steady pursuit of Naturalism. ( Works, 5.424)
He further noted: 'I have often been told that any one who will read Kant, Strauss, and the rest of the German metaphysicians and divines, resolutely through... will, after ten or twelve years' labour, discover that there is very little harm in them; but I believe also that the ten or twelve years may be better spent' ( Works, 5.435).
Ruskin had been made fully aware of his lack of knowledge with regard to German art and art museums on 7 April, 1857, through his inability to give satisfactory information during his evidence to the National Gallery Site Commission. When asked about his familiarity with the Munich Gallery, he had to admit that he 'had not been to Germany for twenty years' ( Works, 13.543). Subsequently, Ruskin's tour of Germany in 1859 would confirm his dislike of the modern German school.