| Ruskin
in Sheffield The original museum The Museum of St George 
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John Ruskin, 1819-1900Born into the close-knit family of a prosperous wine merchant in London, England, Ruskin attended Christ Church College at Oxford, graduating in 1843 with an MA. He became known as a brilliant critic of landscape painting and a champion of the works of the painter J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. He later became chair of Fine Arts at Oxford University. Ruskin is viewed by many as a member of a group of Englishmen who began the Arts & Crafts movement in that nation in the latter half of the 19th century. This movement was the forerunner of the American Arts & Crafts movement. Ruskin's contributions to the era included his avowed dislike for classical works in buildings & art and his substitution of the Gothic with its asymmetry and roughness as the ideal for new art. Along with William Morris, he was critical of the new industrialization taking place in Europe and America. Ruskin's most radical idea was his total rejection of any machine produced products. He characterized all machine made objects as "dishonest." He believed, along with Morris, that handwork and craftsmanship brought dignity to labor. He further felt that the factory/industrial work of the age disrupted the natural rhythms of life by imposing artificial hours and conditions on workers. To this end he founded a utopian Arts & Crafts community in 1871. Ruskin is most famous for his two books; "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1853). These works established the criteria for judging the value of art(s) for several generations in both Britain and America.top John Ruskin set up his museum in Sheffield in order to provide useful instruction to the artisans of that city. The museum collection still exists, although displayed rather differently than in Ruskin's time. The museum originally occupied a single room, the idea being, to quote Ruskin himself (as is hard to resist): "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. Give little, but that little good and beautiful, and explain it thoroughly." top A visitor in the 1890s noted "an attention to minute detail which strikes the intelligent observor in all the arrangements of the room". The original contents included a library, precious stones, and pictures. The stones were chosen with the eye of an artist and placed on fabrics to emphasise their delicate colours. The pictures included sketches by Ruskin himself, most particularly of alpine scenes (both for their beauty and because Ruskin had a great interest in geology, especially of landscapes created by glaciers), of bird's feathers and of sculpture. There were sketches by Durer, bird pictures by Stacy Marks, studies of architectural details by the Venetian artist Angelo Alessandri (specially employed by Ruskin for the purpose), and paintings after Carpaccio's Legend of St Ursula by Fairfax Murray, one of Ruskin's many proteges. The collection was later much augmented by Ruskin. top When Ruskin set up the museum, he called it the "Museum of St George", and it was one of four sites of the Guild of St George, a body which existed to promulgate the views of Ruskin. As well as the museum, there was a botanical gardens at Mickley in Derbyshire which researched methods of growing fruit trees in the Northern England climate, and at Bewdley an estate of woodlands and fields which Ruskin aimed to protect from the rampant industrial development all around. top |