Run from the Temple:The Stale Crusts of John Ruskin.

Pubes. I'd fallen for the urban myth that John Ruskin was so disturbed by the sight of his young wife's pubic hair that he had been unable to consummate their marriage. I'd been so certain of, or so wanted to believe, this fantastic story that I'd repeated it often. Once to my friends Pam and Shep on our way to a festival (such an integral part of the day did I view it that it found its way into the blog). But, on television recently, I heard Mary Beard say there was no truth in the story.

I'm not sure how she'd know. Ruskin died fifty-five years before Mary Beard was born so it seems unlikely she's got first hand experience of what happened on his wedding night. But, I'm a fan of Mary Beard and if she says John Ruskin wasn't terrified of female body hair then I believe her.

What I am willing to believe though, is that John Ruskin seems just the kind of fuddy-duddy old prude who would be freaked out by a hairy fanny. The recent John Ruskin:The Power of Seeing exhibition at the beautiful Two Temple Place down by the Thames may have been intended to show us what a pivotal role Ruskin played in the development of nineteenth century art and culture but I came away from it thinking what a frightful bore he must have been.

The sort of man whose opinionated blatherings would have driven you to distraction and, almost certainly, an utterly ghastly snob to boot. We're told he devoted his entire life to his "quest for knowledge" but most of the evidence stacked up here suggests he rode on the coat-tails of far greater artists and looked down his nose at anyone who hadn't, like him, been born into privilege. The curators of the show have described him as an "artist, critic, educator, social thinker and true polymath" but I think they've missed a far more apt description - "tosser".

John Ruskin - Study of a Spray of dead Oak Leaves (1879)

We'll get round to why I think he's a tosser eventually, don't worry, but it's not because of his pleasant, if unexceptional 1879 watercolour of a dead oak leaf. That's pretty inoffensive. The Power of Seeing has been put together to mark the bicentenary of Ruskin's birth in 1819 in Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, London. His father was a Scottish sherry merchant and his mother, the pious (the curator's choice of word, not mine) daughter of a Croydon pub landlord.

"Hot-housed and molly-coddled" throughout his youth, he was designed, we're told, for greatness. A poet perhaps, maybe a bishop. In an attempt to push him towards the former vocation he was presented with a book of poetry but it was the illustrations by JMW Turner that piqued the young Ruskin's interest. It wouldn't be the last time that Ruskin warmed himself in the glow of Turner's talent.

Ruskin, despite his ability as a collector, educator, and agitator, was barely fit to hold Turner's easel. His paintings and drawings are certainly better than I could manage, better than most of us could muster, but they're never quite good enough. His fame came mainly through his 1860 book Modern Painters, his passion for the city of Venice and its architecture, his work as a Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and for his admittedly fine work in creating a regional art museum in Sheffield.

John Ruskin, Ancienne Maison, Lucerne, Switzerland (1835)

We're presented, initially, with a small selection of Ruskin juvenilia that shows he had plenty of skill as a child and then a teenager, even if that skill never really transcended technical ability and became inspired as such. There's a map of Scotland, his father's birthplace, he drew when he was nine years old and there's a lovingly detailed representation of Lucerne's Ancienne Maison drawn when Ruskin was still a teenager.

There's also a study a piece of brick which shows Ruskin was one for the details but all of these are outclassed by William Henry Hunt's luscious grapes and pineapple and Albrecht Durer's 1514 Melancolia. It's fair enough to be upstaged by one of the art world's most important figures but Hunt was a contemporary of Ruskin's and he's got the edge on him too.

William Henry Hunt - Grapes and a Pineapple (c.1850)

John Ruskin - Study of a piece of Brick, to show Cleavage in Burned Clay (c.1871)

Albrecht Durer - Melancholia I (1514)

We learn that Ruskin "spoke as if through a megaphone", as if volume could drown out talent, and that he had "fierce convictions - until he changed his mind" - which makes him sound an irritating prick. I was starting to wonder if even the curators of this show liked him. Certainly many of his pupils had no respect for him. They mocked and jeered him, even when his health was deteriorating.

It seems he felt he had a divine right (divine is the word as Ruskin has been brought up very religiously) to decree what was beautiful and what was not and perhaps this is why his art seems instructive and didactic rather than beautiful or magical. There's nothing wrong, per se, with his Kapellbrucke at Luzern or hisTowers of Freiburg and I'd go so far as to say his View of Bologna is really quite lovely. But compare those works to a Turner (who Ruskin met in 1840 and declared as the "greatest of the age; the greatest in every faculty of the imagination") and you'll have to agree Ruskin falls a little short.

John Ruskin - The Kapelbrucke at Luzern (Lucerne) (1861)

John Ruskin - Towers of Freiburg (1855)

John Ruskin - View of Bologna (c.1845-6)

J.M.W. Turner - Brinkburn Priory, Northumberland; drawing for A Picturesque Tour of England and Wales (c.1832)

J.M.W. Turner - Venetian Festival (c.1845)

At least he had the good grace to admit it. He wasn't always so graceful. There's an information board on the wall in Two Temple Place titled "Fifteen Things Heartily Loathed by John Ruskin" and they range from the Houses of Parliament ("the most effeminate and effectless heap of stones ever raised by men"), The Renaissance Buildings of Venice, ("amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men"), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo ("the most disgusting book written by man) to lawyers, making money, and even iron railings (which "always mean thieves outside, or Bedlam inside.

Elsewhere he found room to be rude about Richard Wagner, Palladio, King's College Chapel in Cambridge, cycling, the English constitution, Victorian church statuary, being photographed, railway stations in general, and, more specifically, the railways around Dieppe. On and on this over privileged self-obsessed, but completely lacking in self awareness, bore went. Whingeing and whining and then changing his mind on a whim. 

He appears to have been such a monumental pain in the ass that even when he gets something right you find yourself wanting to disagree with him. He felt architecture was the "enduring expression of a nation's life and character" and, along with music and cuisine, it probably is. His Stones of Venice predated the idea of listing buildings and that's a good thing. We should keep hold of our history. But that doesn't mean we can't have new buildings as well. That's the thing with history. It's not still. It's always moving. Always changing. You get the impression Ruskin wanted buildings, and history, preserved in brine.

John Ruskin - The Towers of Thun, Switzerland (1854)

John Ruskin - Santa Maria della Spina, East end, Pisa, Italy (1845)

Stirrup Jar, Rhodes (c.1090-1060BC)

Amphora, Estrucan (c.560BC-540BC)

Or even recreated. He loved ancient Greek and Etruscan pottery but he was also a fan of Gothic architecture and his championing of it saw neo-Gothic edifices spring up over the north of England during the late Victorian era. When he visited Venice with his young, and fully pubescent, wife Effie Gray in 1848 he set about, with plumb-line, tape measure, and notebook, recording all the buildings under threat from unsympathetic restoration and thought the downfall of the once great Venetian empire could teach us all something.

In a letter of Grey's, she wrote of her husband:- "nothing disturbs him. He is seen either with a black cloth over his head taking Daguerrotypes or climbing about the capitals covered with dust, or else with cobwebs just as if he'd just arrived from taking a voyage with the old woman on her broomstick". Ruskin believed Venice had been great because it had been both 'equable' and 'hierarchical', that there was respect between the rulers and the ruled. In other words, people knew their place.

Vincenzo Catena - Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti (c.1523-31)

John Ruskin - Detail of the Vaults of San Marco, Venice, (c.1846)

Typical fucking toff. It's easy enough to say the social order is right and correct when you're at the top of it, as Ruskin was. This man is held in some quarters as if he's some kind of revolutionary. That's as insane as imagining Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris fucking Johnson to be men of the people. 

While Ruskin was making quaint little sketches of the vaults of San Marco, other artists like John Wharlton Bunney were giving the same building colour, form, and life. Ruskin said of the best buildings of Venice that they "could be read like the pages of the book" but it was Bunney who made you want to turn the pages of that book, rather than slide it down the back of your trousers so as not to experience the full severity of one of Ruskin's spanking reprimands.

John Wharlton Bunney - Western Facade of the Basilica of San Marco, Venice (1877-1882)

John Wharlton Bunney - South West Corner of the Doge's Palace, Venice (1871)

The exhibition, as it winds up through Two Temple Place's opulent stairwell, takes us from Venice to Sheffield. That's not a journey you take everyday and I'm willing to put good money on the fact that few attempting the Grand Tour found themselves in South Yorkshire's largest conurbation.

Ruskin had been 'introduced' to Sheffield by his friend, the engraver Henry Swan, whom he'd taught at the Working Men's College in London in the 1950s. Swan eventually become the first curator of Ruskin's St George's Museum when it opened in Sheffield in 1875 and Ruskin moved his extensive collection north, partly because he was so impressed with the artisan skill of Sheffield steel workers who'd even been mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer as far back as the fourteenth century.

He was also impressed with Sheffield's forward thinking governorship. The Sheffield People's College had been founded by the Rev R.S.Bayley in 1842 and provided morning and evening classes on a variety of subjects, underpinned by the notion that education for all could bring about a radical, and positive, change in society.

On this, any sane person would have to observe that Ruskin made right the call and, more than twenty years after Ruskin's death, the Sheffield museum continued to make good decisions. Not least the inclusion of Stanley Royle's Sheffield from Wincobank Wood in its galleries. It captures both the industry of the city but also the surrounding countryside and it's really a rather lovely painting.

Stanley Royle - Sheffield from Wincobank Wood (1923)

Elsewhere, in The Power of Seeing, you can ponder a Sheffield steel knife with twenty different attachments (like a Swiss army knife), learn that cutlery means 'that which cuts', ponder a circular canape bowl decorated with seven different patterns representing the seven hills that surround Sheffield (like Rome), and read about Ruskin's extensive study of birds.

"You cannot so much as once look at the rufflings of the plumes of a pelican .... or carefully draw the contours of the wing either of a vulture or a common swift, or paint the rose and vermillion on that of a flamingo, without receiving almost a new conception of the meaning of form and colour in creation" wrote Ruskin in the predictably pompously titled The Relation of Art to Use.

When he wasn't instructing people to observe the behaviour of birds he was doing the same for landscape. Both good ideas - though he could have made them sound like they'd be fun - which they would be - rather than exercises in piousness and self-building. On landscape he wrote "the spiritiual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it ... this was the essential love of Nature in me, this root of all that I have become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned".

John Ruskin - 'The Matterhorn from the Moat of the Riffelhorn', drawing towards Modern Painters (1849)

John Brett - Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily (c.1870)

John Ruskin - Mer de Glace, Chamonix (1860)

Rightly learned, you'll note, not lightly learned. Ruskin was not a man to wear his knowledge lightly. Yet his depictions of the Mer de Glace in Chamonix and the Matterhorn, as ever, paled in comparison with contemporaries like John Brett whose Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily knocks Ruskin's pencil-squeezy pictures into a cocked hat. 

Ruskin had once tried to coax Brett away from these bright colours but soon came to see that Brett needed to take his own path. Away from Ruskin's (initially useful and well meant) patronage it seems to me that Brett became a far better artist. Mount Etna looks both vivid and unreal at the same time. It looks exciting, dangerous. It looks like a place you'd want to go and a place you may also fear to go. Ruskin's Matterhorn just looks like a drawing on a piece of paper. It lacks the life that Brett has imbued Etna and Taormina with.

George Frederic Watts, in 1889, was another who, like Brett, made Italian volcanoes come to life in a way that Ruskin could not do for the Alps or for the Venetian buildings. Ruskin spoke to "unspeakably solemn feelings" of pondering Vesuvius but it took others, like Watts, to paint it.

Ultimately, Ruskin wrote passionately and authoritatively about both art and architecture. The fact he was a grumpy old git who didn't even seem to appreciate he'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and seemed to lack even the most basic sense of humour hardly warms you to him as a man. But if he'd been a great artist that would have been forgiven (Degas, Gauguin, Caravaggio - many great artists were not great men), but, sadly, he was not a great artist.

His great skill was recognising, after a fashion, and promoting some of those who were (Ruskin's court case with Whistler which I haven't even mentioned leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and makes Ruskin look far more reactionary than even I've tried to portray him here) and it's for that, rather than his mediocre art and boring conservative opinions, we should remember him.

I walked out of the gallery and London was, as it always does in the sunshine, showing its best side. I marvelled at the old buildings like Ruskin would have done - but I marvelled at the new ones too - which he almost certainly would not have done. I loved the juxtaposition of them, the way they play off each other. I may not be a great as writer as John Ruskin but when it comes to seeking out beauty I've got a far more open mind than him. Pubes'n'all.

George Frederic Watts - The Bay of Naples (1889)