The Reverend John Eagles (1783-1855), clergyman, artist and author. His ambition to become a professional landscape artist in the tradition of Poussin and Salvator Rosa was unfulfilled, and after being refused by the Old Water-Colour Society in 1809, he decided to take holy orders. A graduate of Oxford, he, like his fellow-critic George Darley, of the Athenaeum, followed the theories of art outlined in Reynolds's Discourses. From 1833 a regular contributor to Blackwood's Magazine on a wide range of subjects, Eagles wrote under the pseudonym of 'The Sketcher'. Eagles's suggestion, made in 1842, that Blackwood's should publish a periodical entirely devoted to the arts, and which Eagles himself would edit, was not taken up.
After his death Eagles was described as a 'highly-accomplished old English clergyman and country gentleman' (see here) by Margaret Oliphant reviewing Modern Painters I in Blackwood's Magazine, December 1855, and by his obituarist as 'a Tory of the old school in matters of both Church and State' ( Blackwood's Magazine, December 1855, p. 758). (See also Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House.)
The dispute between Ruskin and Eagles following Eagles's critical attack on Turner in 1836, provoked a long-lived animosity which not only coloured the relationship between Ruskin and Blackwood's, but developed into a wider dispute between Ruskin and the critics.