The critical attack on Turner by John Eagles in Blackwood's Magazine, October 1836, and the hostility to Turner which characterised Eagles's reviews of the Royal Academy Exhibitions, provoked a conflict between Ruskin and Eagles, into which George Darley, the critic of the Athenaeum, entered in 1844. Both Eagles and Darley, writing for conservative periodicals, based their critical verdicts on Reynolds's Discourses (1769-90). Their perception of Modern Painters I as a challenge to the authority of Reynolds, legitimated by his position as President of the Royal Academy, suggests that the stake between Ruskin and these conservative critics was cultural legitimacy. Eagles and Darley defended their cultural capital by misinterpreting Ruskin's emphasis on factual detail (see MP I:46 and MP I:65) as the encouragement of purely representational landscape (see here) (see here), whose lack of intellectual appeal gave it a low status in the hierarchy of genres. (See Blackwood's Magazine, October 1843 and the Athenaeum, 3 and 10 February 1844.)
The dispute develops in the preface to the second edition of Modern Painters I (1844), where, from the high moral ground of religion, Ruskin defends his opposition to Reynoldsian aesthetics by claiming that they have impeded landscape from revealing the divine truths of the natural world ( MP I:xxii-xxiv).
(See Ruskin and Reynolds).