The Grass of the Field

From The Two Paths: being lectures on art and it’s application to decoration and manufacture (London: Smith Elder, 1859).

‘The Grass of the Field’ depicts a shaft of wheat transmuted into metal. The plate illustrates Ruskin’s challenge to his reader: ‘how would you like the world, if all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire’ (LE 26 (1905)/378). Ruskin recognised that he was living through a period of unprecedented change. His works frequently explored how the future may be changed by human intervention in the natural world. When we are increasingly recognising the role of human agency in changing the Earth’s climate and environment, Ruskin’s concerns for environmental issues and the impact of new technologies are prescient.

The plate illustrates the printed form of a lecture delivered on February 16th, 1858 at Tunbridge Wells, titled ‘The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art and Policy’. Ruskin introduces the lecture by recounting visiting Tunbridge Wells as a child, and the memory of ‘the clear water, sparkling over the saffron strain’ that inspired a lecture on ‘the power … and other functions of the steely element to which so many here owe returning strength and life’ (LE 26 (1905)/376).

Ruskin invites his audience not to dismiss rusted iron as ‘spoiled iron’, but as a nobler substance because it has, through oxidisation, become a composite of iron and air (LE 26 (1905)//376). In contrast to the pure metals, ‘good enough for swords or scissors’, metals that have taken oxygen from the air are part of the ecosystem that give life (LE 26 (1905)//377). Iron is essential for healthy plant growth. From a single blade of grass or iron wire, he describes the interaction of substance and oxygen – breath – as essential to ‘the earth from which we feed, the stones with which we build, … the rocks that frame the mountains, and the sands that bind the sea’. For Ruskin, an understanding of the interconnectedness of things is available to us all, by looking closely at the building blocks of the earth: ‘Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read … this curious lesson in it’ (LE 26 (1905)/378).

‘The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art and Policy’ was printed in The Two Paths: being lectures on art and it’s application to decoration and manufacture, illustrated by the plate ‘Grass of the Field’. The illustration was produced by etching the design into a plate, which could be covered in ink and printed in reverse. Engraving plates can be made from different metals, including copper and steel. Since steel is harder than copper, the etched line could be produced using acid.
Intertwined strands express Ruskin’s argument for the interconnectedness of things, the ‘living’ qualities of both grass and iron, and emphasise processes of change and transformation. The plate is symbolic of the ways in which Ruskin’s close work with his publisher, George Allen, advanced and exploited many of the optical and reproductive technologies coming on stream, allowing the interaction of text and image to provide greater depth to the communication of knowledge.