Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

The drawing shows the walls of Rheinfelden, apparently with the Obertorturm in the distance on the left, and the Storchennestturm in the foreground, right. On the left, completed in greater detail, is a tree-lined moat with a bridge across it and, unusually for Ruskin, a woman is shown reading or working beneath a tree in the centre. The drawing is largely in graphite, although small areas of white bodycolour have been used on the hillside to the left of the wall and on the Obertorturm, and a grey wash has been used on the roofs of both towers, around the landscape and bridge to the left. The roofs have been reinforced with black ink, and the foreground with black watercolour.

Ruskin was in Rheinfelden for a week from 18 May 1858, the date he has added to this drawing. References to drawings in progress in his letters over the next few days may relate to this drawing, or to the eleven others he produced during his visit.

The drawing was first catalogued in the Oxford collection in 1906, when Cook and Wedderburn included it as no. 93 in the Reference Series - one of a set of frames (nos 84-100) which Ruskin had never listed in his own catalogues of the collection.

He wrote to his father on 20 May that 'the most beautiful thing of all is the old moat round the whole town, now filled with the sweetest possible gardens, chiefly in flower with white narcissus and tulips ... the grey walls above covered with ivy, and with all their towers yet unfallen: you will see them in Turner's sketches' (VII.xxix). The drawing was engraved by J. H. Keux and, under the title "Peace", reproduced in vol. V of "Modern Painters" (pl. 84 = VII, f.p. 437), where it was included 'to show the kind of scene which modern ambition and folly are destroying throughout Switzerland' (vol. V, ch. xi, § 31 n = VII.436-7).