Read Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves for Free Online Page B

competitiveness that was to last a lifetime. But late in 1846, after a period of intense collecting, Robinson’s money finally ran out. He was forced to return home to Nottingham in the middle of an English winter, complaining in his diary that the city was ‘desolate’. 8
    Back in Nottingham, Robinson missed desperately the romance of Paris and the thrill of making contacts there. He continued to paint, but could not find a way of supporting himself as an artist. For a while, his life seemed dull and miserable. His years in France had made an enormous impact on him, inspiring his collecting and offering glimpses of what could be. Short of money and lonely, these possibilities suddenly seemed all too distant. But Robinson was lucky. On 1 June 1847, he was appointed to work at the Nottingham School of Art, before moving just two months later to a post as Assistant Master at the government School of Design in Hanley, where he doubled his salary to one hundred pounds a year. At first glance, teaching drawing skills in the industrial smog of the Midlands potteries was not a glamorous job. But one of Robinson’s first tasks was to return to France, to report on the state of pottery and design, and on the teaching of art. He was delighted to be back in Paris, and he was convinced that he had found a quick route to promotion. He was confident that, with his inside knowledge, his report would get him noticed, releasing him from the stagnancy of his provincial backwater and into a morevibrant life in London. In the meantime, he could stroll again by the Seine and rummage in junkshops.
    For the next few years, before starting at the South Kensington Museum in 1853, Robinson travelled as much as his job would allow – for work, for pleasure and to make himself an expert. In 1851, he discovered the pleasures of Italy, and found for the first time a beauty and romance to challenge anything he had seen in France. Apart from the ‘curse’ of mosquitoes, which he bemoaned in his letters, there was nothing to upset his enthusiasm. He was overwhelmed by the spectacular sculpture and the magnificent architecture of cities like Verona and Padua; in Florence the glories were so numerous that Robinson was ‘too excited to go to bed’; and then there was Venice. ‘I have just got in from a moonlight sail through Venice,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘The moon is at the full – brilliant – pouring down floods of light through a deep blue endless sky, such as
you
have never seen and never will til you come to Italy – Imagine, but you can’t imagine! – and I am too stupid to describe and no I can’t, I can’t begin, what an ass I am.’ 9
    Robinson was inspired by Italian architecture and art, by the landscape, the language and the culture. He felt he had found a spiritual home, one which was to influence his collecting for the rest of his life. For several months during the summer of 1851, he went from city to city, from Milan to Brescia, Verona to Padua, Ferrara to Bologna. Italy was beginning to occupy a particular place in the Victorian imagination, and Robinson was at the heart of this impulse to celebrate, and romanticize, what could be experienced there. Since the eighteenth century, the British elite had shown a fascination with Italy and its art: half of the paintings sold for more than £40 at London auctions between 1711 and 1760 were by Italian masters, and the Italian towns were well-established highlights of the Grand Tour. Canaletto’s idealized paintings of Venice, showing aristocraticpalaces alongside pristine canals, were hugely fashionable in eighteenth-century Britain. But travellers like Robinson were beginning to look beyond the well-trodden paths to the Grand Masters. In 1851, the same year as Robinson’s journey, John Ruskin published the first volume of
The Stones of Venice
, an influential book-length essay which held up Italian Gothic