On colour and on the necessity for a general diffusion of taste among all classes: with remarks on laying out dressed or geometrical gardens : examples of good and bad taste illustrated by woodcuts and coloured plates in contrast

Abstract

John Gardner Wilkinson was born in 1797, the son of John Wilkinson, a clergyman, of Hardendale in Westmorland, and Mary Anne Wilkinson (ne Gardner). Through his mother he was related to the Crewe family of Calke Abbey in south Derbyshire. Wilkinson’s Egyptological work contributed to the foundation of that discipline in Britain, but his research and publications ranged beyond Egypt into architecture, aesthetics, international relations and the classics, as well as travel and the study of ancient Britain. Moreover, in his detailed water-colours and drawings, as in his extensive notes and ‘journals’ (now in the Bodleian), he recorded his impressions of the architecture, costume and contemporary society of all the countries he visited. This treatise is based on his observations on continental museums and their decoration, and he praises Jones’s Greek and Alhambra Courts at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as “admirable specimens of harmony of colour.” Importantly he displays a Ruskinian concern for the education of the “mass of the population”, and is dismayed that “the means of visiting objects of good taste that are afforded to the working classes of Italy, France, Germany and other parts of Europe”, are not available in England. He notes that the working classes are prevented by their work from visiting museums during six days of the week, and the best means of instructing them, the Crystal Palace, was still closed on the seventh day. It is no surprise that Wilkinson was among Ruskin’s favourite writers, and they exchanged letters. Ruskin thought this treatise “excellent in almost all points” but yielding “too much indulgence to that old idea that nature is to be idealised or improved when it is brought down to manufacture or decoration.” Ruskin’s book The Two Paths, Being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, was published in 1859.