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

A view across the rippling waters of Lake Geneva towards the north-east, with trees and the buildings of Vevey silhouetted on the far bank and the purple forms of the Molard and Dent de Lys beyond. Above the mountains, to the centre, white clouds streak the sky, whilst a bank of mist shrouds the lower slopes of the mounatins.

Ruskin stayed at Vevey on several occasions, and there is consequently some dispute as to when this drawing was created. Penny suggests Ruskin's Swiss tour of 1849, when Ruskin was in Vevey in May and early June and made a series of Alpine studies inspired by Turner, proposing that it may have been executed as one of a number of studies of clouds which were intended for the third volume of "Modern Painters". Taylor, however, favours Ruskin's stop at Vevey on 1 May 1869: he had stayed at Neuchâtel the previous day, when Taylor suggests that the drawing of "Afternoon in Spring, with south Wind, at Neuchâtel", which was framed with this drawing, was made, proposing that the two drawings were done within a short space of time of each other.

The drawing was first catalogued in the Drawing School in 1871, as no. 8 I in Case XII of the Educational Series, which was devoted to 'Rocks, Water, and Clouds'. Although renumbered, as 298, it remained in the same place in the 1874 catalogue of the series.