Tristram Hunt: How to repatriate art

At the start of last year, the Leopard Inn in Burslem, the scene of the celebrated meeting between potter Josiah Wedgwood and engineer James Brindley to agree the navigation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, ‘went on fire’. Close by, the Wedgwood Institute, founded by William Gladstone in 1863 as a design school, and proudly decorated with terracotta panels narrating the art of ceramics, stands empty. And last week, a 10ft-high red-brick bust of Wedgwood, designed by Vincent Woropay for the 1986 Stoke-on-Trent Garden Festival, was knocked down. By using weathered brickwork to sculpt Wedgwood’s coiffured hair and penetrating gaze, Woropay captured both the aesthetic delicacy of his subject and the might of the Industrial Revolution. The landmark was ‘mistakenly’ demolished for a road-widening scheme, but it is all starting to look a lot like abandonment. The late, great Paul Johnson, a child of the Potteries, once castigated the ‘dreary and uniform modernity’ imperilling Stoke’s cityscape of potbanks and bottle-kilns. The carelessness must cease and Josiah must be rebuilt, brick by Staffordshire brick. 

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British Steel and the death of dim-witted globalisation

The transformative power of sculpture is on our minds at the V&A this week, as the museum prepares to open its seminal Donatello exhibition. In bronze, marble and terracotta, this quattrocento Florentine genius revolutionised carving techniques, the use of perspective, and the ability to capture the travails of the human condition. He established the contours of the Italian Renaissance and in his wake came Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. The South Kensington connection to Donatello began with a major purchase in 1861 (agreed by the normally parsimonious William Gladstone as chancellor) which, in the words of the previous director John Pope-Hennessy, ‘changed the whole character of the museum collection’ and saw our galleries rival the British Museum and National Gallery.