Ruskin and South Kensington: contrasting approaches to art education

This article deals with Ruskin’s contribution to art education and training, as it can be defined by comparison and contrast with the government-sponsored art training supplied by (to use the handy nickname) ‘South Kensington’. It is tempting to treat this matter, and thus to dramatize it, as a personality clash between Ruskin and Henry Cole – who, ten years older than Ruskin, was the man in charge of the South Kensington system. Robert Hewison has commented that their ‘individual personalities, attitudes and ambitions are so diametrically opposed as to represent the longitude and latitude of Victorian cultural values’. He characterises Cole as ‘utilitarian’ and ‘rationalist’, as against Ruskin, who was a ‘romantic anti-capitalist’ and in favour of the ‘imaginative’. This article will set the personality clash in the broader context of Victorian art education.