Ruskin's return

In 1875, the Victorian critic set up a museum intended to improve the minds of the metalworkers of Sheffield. This week the strange collection of fossils and artworks reopens as part of the city's new Millennium Galleries. But what do its contents mean for us today?

By Matthew Sweet
Published: 01 April 2001

By the end of his life, John Ruskin Victorian Britain's greatest art critic, academic, anti-capitalist, communist, connoisseur, draughtsman, educationalist, environmentalist, ornithologist, social engineer and little girl enthusiast had retreated into a second childhood of helplessness and unreason. He was given to foul-mouthed, window-smashing tantrums, during which he would throw his friends out of the house because he believed Cardinal Manning and the Duke of Argyle were expected any moment. He would crash out on the sofa and, subdued and teary, refer to his loyal nurse-companion Joan Severn as "mama" and himself as "a little donkey boy". He would compose incoherent diary entries, full of mangled assertions about his dead teenage lover Rose La Touche, the Devil and Gothic architecture. Other jottings combined literary reference with memories of an industrial city with which he enjoyed a long and fruitful association: "least said is soonest mended for &

By the end of his life, John Ruskin – Victorian Britain's greatest art critic, academic, anti-capitalist, communist, connoisseur, draughtsman, educationalist, environmentalist, ornithologist, social engineer and little girl enthusiast – had retreated into a second childhood of helplessness and unreason. He was given to foul-mouthed, window-smashing tantrums, during which he would throw his friends out of the house because he believed Cardinal Manning and the Duke of Argyle were expected any moment. He would crash out on the sofa and, subdued and teary, refer to his loyal nurse-companion Joan Severn as "mama" and himself as "a little donkey boy". He would compose incoherent diary entries, full of mangled assertions about his dead teenage lover Rose La Touche, the Devil and Gothic architecture. Other jottings combined literary reference with memories of an industrial city with which he enjoyed a long and fruitful association: "least said is soonest mended – for – if up when the scuffle comes – the foils should be Sheffield whettles – it is dangerous work – Laertes."

Even in his final madness, Ruskin's thoughts still turned to Sheffield. And, 101 years after his death, Sheffield is returning the compliment. On Thursday, the city's Millennium Galleries will open to the public complete with a space devoted to Ruskin's vision. The Galleries are a Lottery-funded four-for-one offer: inside a neo-Paxtonian glasshouse – built by architects Pringle Richard Sharratt – visitors will be able to view the contents of a quartet of exhibition spaces. The V&A is the first tenant of the largest gallery, where it will be staging "Precious", a show which will use Lucretia Borgia's mirror, some Han dynasty jade-work and those Vivienne Westwood shoes in which Naomi Campbell took a tumble, to explore the idea of cultural, spiritual and commercial value. A second gallery will showcase craft and design work. A third houses a permanent display of the domestic and decorative metalwork with which the city's name is synonymous. Curator Helen Phillips has arranged a luminous spread of steel and silver: a Victorian cucumber-shaving gadget, like a cross between a bacon-slicer and an Archimedes screw; a pair of monster scissors from the Great Exhibition; a minimalist 1880s toast rack, the design for which was recently re-used by Alessi, and a Nelson knife – a long blade with three prongs for use by one-armed diners. It will be a fitting tribute to the energy and creativity of an industry which – at its Victorian zenith – can claim to have exported both scalping blades to Native Americans and the Bowie knife with which "Buffalo" Bill Cody did for the chief of the Cheyenne.

At the end of the museum's long internal avenue is the Ruskin Gallery in which visitors will be able to view material from a collection first seen in Sheffield in 1875. It includes mineral and biological specimens, medieval sculpture, ornithological paintings and a huge canvas of St Mark's in Venice by JW Bunney – but it is not overfilled with objects. As Ruskin wrote, "In all museums intended for popular teaching, there are two great evils to be avoided. The first is superabundance, the second, disorder. The first is having too much of everything. You will find in your own work that the less you have to look at, the better you attend. You can no more see twenty things worth seeing in an hour, than you can read twenty books worth reading in a day".

The creation of a new museum in a northern industrial city was part of a broader Ruskinian project to shape British society for the better; to use the enormous fortune he had inherited from his parents to wean his fellow Victorians from consumerism, over-reliance on technology, and the pursuit of profit for profit's sake. He persuaded soft undergraduate toffs to do stints on a road-resurfacing project in the mud-slaked Oxfordshire village of Ferry Hinskey. He founded a botanical gardens in Mickley, Derbyshire, and agrarian commune in Totley, near Sheffield. He set aside "Ruskinland" – a seven-acre wooded estate in Bewdley, Worcestershire – which he determined to protect from industrial pollution and overdevelopment. He worked to establish a number of workers' education schemes. Through the Guild of St George, an agency he founded to promulgate the ideas conveyed in his books and lectures, he invested the greater part of his fortune in community education projects. In today's terms, he was a one-man Millennium Commission.

That Ruskin chose to house his collection in South Yorkshire is directly attributable to Henry Swan, a Wiltshire-born Quaker and vegetarian who attended classes at the London Working Men's College in the mid-1850s. In 1873, Ruskin visited Swan, then resident in Walkley, near Sheffield, and decided that he would make a suitable custodian for a collection of art exhibits and natural history samples. These, he intended, would form the of basis of what Camilla Hampshire, curator of the new Ruskin Gallery, describes as "a visual reference system for the people of Sheffield". In one of the letters collected in Fors Clavigera (1871-84), Ruskin uses less grandiose language, noting his rental of "a room at Sheffield in which I propose to place some books and minerals as the germ of a museum arranged first for workers in iron". Swan was employed as a live-in curator, where he dwelt – rather uncomfortably – among the plaster casts and display cases. And, barring a two-decade sojourn at the University of Reading, the collection has remained in Sheffield ever since. Its new steel-and-glass home will make it one of the most prominent features of what has become known as Sheffield's "cultural industries quarter".

The area is home to the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University, the Lyceum and the Crucible Theatre. The city, the publicity material for the Millennium Galleries insists, is "being launched as the new cultural capital of the North". Fingers are clearly being kept crossed – even the Galleries' head of marketing admits that the Sheffield "doesn't have a natural museum-going public". Indeed, the surrounding area has become a white elephant's graveyard of lottery-funded visitor attractions. Just around the corner from the Galleries, the £15 million giant steel mushroom-patch of the National Centre for Popular Music sits silently, as it has since August 2000, when it closed after just 16 months. Bradford's religious-themed Life-Force Centre survived for less than a year. The £100-million Earth Centre in Doncaster has endured seismic financial problems and is now attempting to counter rumours that its £14.4 million second phase will never be completed. The plan – initiated, largely, by the last government – was to make the region a cultural hotspot: instead, a series of small black holes has been generated.

The backers of the Galleries are hoping that their new joint project will break this run of bad luck. And they may well succeed. The problem with the failures of the past – apart from their banal, Dome-zone quality – was that they had no obvious relationships with the areas in which they were constructed. Despite its associations with Cockers Jarvis and Joe, the National Popular Music Centre had no real business to be in Sheffield. But the Millennium Galleries have Ruskin, silver and steel at their heart. And failure, perhaps, is simply too depressing to contemplate. Better to hope for a new renaissance that interpret talk of glasshouses, Lucretia Borgia's mirror, Han Dynasty jade and Sheffield whettles as the ramblings of a city in its post-industrial dotage.

Millennium Galleries, Sheffield (0114 2782600) from Thursday

Link: The Independent

© The Independent 2001