The public will soon get to see a gift presented to the Ashmolean by John Ruskin, writes CHRIS KOENIG

The £61m revamp of the Ashmolean in Oxford will mean that the museum will have 39 new galleries and a doubling of display space. This in turn means that custodians are restoring more and more artefacts to put on display when the enlarged museum opens in 2009.

Now companies are being invited to sponsor exhibits that will fill the new galleries. Construction company Beard of Cumnor, for instance, which was responsible for cleaning and restoring much of the stonework of the Ashmolean, has made a donation that will enable conservators to renovate a limestone monument dating from 200BC, given to the museum by John Ruskin, for display in the new Cyprus Gallery.

The limestone grave-marker monument, discovered in the 19th century, suffers from ingrained dirt. It was one of many works of art which Ruskin gave to the Ashmolean, along with various specimens he also gave to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Ruskin could afford such generosity because he inherited a fortune from his father, a sherry merchant who promoted the Domecq label. He became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869, resigned the chair in 1879, but resumed it again in 1883.

The reason for the gap was that he suffered a nervous breakdown. It was caused by the stress of a libel action brought against him by the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler in 1878, surely one of the strangest cases ever to come before the Old Bailey.

Jurors were asked to decide whether the opinion of the greatest art critic of his day (Ruskin) on a work by Whistler was so rude and derogatory as to constitute a slur on the artist's character. In the end they decided that it did but the judge awarded Whistler just one farthing in damages and left him to pay the costs - which bankrupted him.

He wore the farthing on a chain around his neck for the rest of his days, but, to some extent, he had the last laugh. He published a pamphlet called Whistler v Ruskin: Art and Art Critics which, along with a lecture entitled Ten O'Clock eventually appeared as The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

Ruskin had said some rude things about Whistler during lectures at Oxford but it was his comments on work exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 that made Whistler sue.

Ruskin wrote in his pamphlet called Fors Clavigera: "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

Ruskin's student days in Oxford were extremely sheltered; he lived with his mother. He graduated from Christ Church in 1842. Then in 1843 he published the first volume of Modern Painters in which he began to expound his ideas about how art should return to nature, which in turn led to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He would probably thoroughly approve of firms such as Beard sponsoring art, after all he wanted to make art accessible to all.

Famously, while the University Museum was being built he handed out books to the workmen and bricks to his students (including Oscar Wilde) whom he set to work building the road at North Hinksey.

He was art teacher to Alice Liddell and a friend of the Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). He compared Ruskin to an eel who taught "Stretching, Drawling, and Fainting in coils".