“Art, devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficial to mankind.” Ruskin, “The Two Paths” 1859

As a young boy growing up in Sheffield just after WWII, I was aware of the ghost of Ruskin, spoken of by arty adults as an adopted son, who had become unfashionable and disappeared “back South”. Filming an interview for this new exhibition in the Ruskin Gallery, I was reminded of his connections with the industrial city from 1875, to which he brought the Guild of St George, his endowment to provide education and social improvement, through an art  gallery. library, school and allotments. In Fors Clavigera 7 (1871) he described
himself as “a Communist of the Old School”, a long way from the Evangelical Ultra-Tory branch of the Church of England of his youth.

I also reflected on the effect on art and architecture which Ruskin the art critic had on public buildings in the surge in Victorian town expansions; churches, cathedrals, town halls and other civic buildings moved quickly from Georgian classicism (“repressive standardisation”) to Gothique using motifs brought back from his visits to France and Italy as a young man; (“Decorated Gothic is the highest form of architecture yet achieved”). He influenced all the major architects, Street, Gilbert Scott, Barry to Lutyens, launched the Pre-Raphaelites and art movements through to the Arts and Crafts workshops of William Morris and his cohorts, who have enriched our re-ordered churches, especially those influenced by the Oxford Movement.

This exhibition includes Ruskin's beautifully detailed watercolour drawings of Santa Maria della Spiria, Pisa (1846) and St Wulfran, Abbeyville (1868) but also works which put his into context by Durer, Turner, Palmer, alongside contemporary works by young Japanese and British artists, all showing craft and commitment to Ruskin?s “bond between the human mind and all visible things”. Ruskin, like Morris and Pugin, is still re-emerging from the dusty basements after our flirtations with Modernism and Post-Modern, stripped of any surface decoration based on nature. This exhibition also shows us that today, as in Ruskin?s time, we live unsustainably; we are exhausting the earth's resources, creating unrest within our communities.
Can art save us?

Roy Thompson