The story
In 1875 the critic John Ruskin did something unusual for a Victorian sage: he built a museum for factory workers. Through his Guild of St George he opened a small collection in a Sheffield suburb, filled with watercolours, minerals and casts, meant to lift the eyes of the men who ground steel in the city's cutlery trade. That Ruskin Collection survives, now shown in the Millennium Gallery downtown.
Sheffield's museums grew around the industry that made the city famous. Alongside the art there is one of the world's great collections of metalwork, tracing four centuries of the knives, silver and tableware stamped Sheffield.
The paintings live a short walk away in the Graves Gallery, a top-floor room of British and European art given to the city in the 1930s by a local businessman, John George Graves, who had made his money selling watches by mail order.
