In letter 79 of Fors Clavigera, June 1877, Ruskin reviewed the inaugural exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, Bond Street. The Grosvenor positioned itself as a more radical venue than the conservative, established Royal Academy, based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, a point which Wilde plays upon in having Lord Henry recommend Basil exhibit his portrait of Dorian at the new gallery (DG 1.170). As a younger man, Wilde had reviewed the exhibition for the Dublin University Magazine in July 1877, praising Whistler's ‘colour symphonies’ and particularly Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, one of ‘the most abused pictures in the whole exhibition’ (2013a: 8). This alluded to Ruskin's complaint that he had ‘never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face’ (CW 29: 160). Whistler sued Ruskin, and on 25 and 26 November 1878, the Court of Exchequer heard the case, deciding in the painter's favour. Although he was awarded only a farthing in damages, the publicity made Whistler's name, the trial becoming a European event that pitted the new ‘aesthetic’ movement against an older order.

Defining Ruskin's relationship with the so-called ‘aesthetic’ movement is a notoriously difficult exercise, and not simply because precisely what constitutes this movement is a fraught historical question. Ruskin's spat with Whistler must be weighed against the critic's support for a number of earlier exemplars of aesthetic theory. Famously, while Wilde was an undergraduate at Oxford, Ruskin pressed the young aesthete-in-the-making into building roads in the summer of 1874, but this was a younger Wilde. More significant was Ruskin's close friendship with, and financial support of, Daniel Gabriele Rossetti and the other pre-Raphaelites Millais and Holman Hunt (1827–91). This early enthusiasm turned sour around 1865, with Ruskin critical of the later, more sensuous developments in Rossetti's art (CW 36: 489), but the critic would still praise his former friend in The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878). Ruskin was also friends with Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), who had first tried to introduce him to Whistler (CW 36: xlviii–xlix) many years before Fors. Ruskin loved Swinburne's poetry, calling Atalanta in Calydon (1865) ‘the grandest thing ever yet done by a youth’ in a letter to Norton, and while reticent on the amorality of the ‘Demoniac youth’, he nevertheless considered his ‘foam at the mouth’ ‘fine’ (CW 36: 501).