London gallery Ranger’s House reopens with a collection of intriguingly ugly objects

London-based museum Ranger’s House reopens to the public today (23 July 2018), and is stuffed to the gills with the kind of oddities that have museum-goers hunched over for hours on end.

As you can imagine, we at It’s Nice That tend to spend most of our time thinking about good looking objects, be they prints, zines, or pint glasses. The thing is, not everything on earth is designed to give us an aesthetic tingle whenever we gaze adoringly at it. In fact, a lot of stuff out there looks terrible, but even within the confines of bad taste, there’s usually a kernel of something interesting going on.

A long-dead diamond dealing Victorian millionaire named Sir Julius Wernher seems to have understood that. His big stately home in Greenwich, London — now owned by English Heritage — is a testament to the perturbing pleasures of the wrong, the broken, and the downright ugly.

In addition to Italian marbles and Renaissance paintings, there are skulls and skeleton galore. Not just any skulls or skeletons, either. If you want your calm, quiet, cosy afternoon out accompanied by an ivory cast of a rotting skeleton infested with salamanders, frogs, and worms you’re in luck.

The gallery’s curator, Sophie Moulden, told The Guardian that, “His particular passion was for what he called the ‘splendidly ugly’, artworks mainly from the medieval and Renaissance periods, which were typically small, unusual in their subject matter and expertly crafted from richly embellished materials.”

We know exactly where we’ll be when the August bank holiday rolls around.