I’ve been living partly in Sheffield for the past month or so, which has given me the chance to catch up on some of the great monuments of industry and power in and near the city – the model miners’ village and the fantastical Jacobean castle in Bolsover, the stately home of Wentworth Woodhouse with its battleship-length Palladian facade, the buildings of the subtle modernist Peter Womersley in Huddersfield.
Also the Weston Park Museum in Sheffield and the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, both of which combine world-class art with humdrum relics of local life. In one, a large John Singer Sargent portrait of three young Yorkshire women shares the premises with the plastic car roof sign of a 1970s driving school. In the other, there is a gallery full of the illuminated tableaux of science and humanity by Joseph Wright of Derby and another room with a collection of stuffed animals, presumably from a local donor. I hope institutions like this, apart from whatever upgrades might be desirable, don’t change: art comes to life when it’s seen as part of the place it comes from.
