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

Clarissa Strozzi is portrayed as a little girl, aged two, leaning over towards the the little dog which sits on the pedestal to her right.

Cook and Wedderburn (XXI.26 n. 3) identify the engraving's subject as 'Titian's portrait of the little daughter of Roberto Strozzi, playing with a dog; the picture is now in the Berlin Gallery': that is, the painting created by Titian in 1542, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Titian's original picture had been added to by the time the engraving was made: a strip along the right edge, as wide the piece of wall painted upon it; and a strip along the bottom edge, as wide as the distance between the edge and the bottom of the drapery, which originally ran up to the edge of the picture.

The print was first listed in the Teaching Collection in 1870, when it was included in the "Catalogue of Examples" as the upper picture in frame 42 of the Reference Series, placed above a photograph of a copy of a van Dyck portrait of James, Duke of York. Both pictures retained their position in the 1872 catalogue of the series. The print formed part of a sequence of pictures by painters - all portrait-painters - who applied paint broadly, using the edges of the painted areas to denote outlines, rather than drawing them in with the point of the brush (Catalogue of Examples, p. 19). In "The Eagle's Nest" (§ 151 = XXII.223-225), Ruskin compared it to a print after Reynolds's "Portrait of Princess Matilda Sophia" (no. 125 in the Rudimentary Series) - considering the Reynolds 'much more delightful'. They stood there as examples of the practice of adding an animal to a portrait either to accompany or contrast with the human sitter - a practice which Ruskin deplored in modern art but felt was done with 'a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by them' by the old masters.