Supporting the values of the Royal Academy, which it took to be synonymous with British art, the Art Union Journal was founded in 1839. Edited by Samuel Carter Hall, it retained its reputation as the voice of the art establishment when it became the Art Journal in 1848. One of the first periodicals to review Modern Painters I, the Art Union accused Ruskin of partisanship and 'indulgence in scurrilities' when discussing artists 'not in the vein of his own taste' in June 1843 ( Works, 3.xliii).
Ruskin responded to this hostile review in a letter to the Artist and Amateur's Magazine early in 1844 ( Works, 3.645-55; see also Roberts, 'Art Reviewing in the Early Nineteenth-Century Art Periodicals', Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 19, March 1973.)