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

The print shows an Egyptian man standing in profile, accompanied by identifying hieroglyphs in a cartouche. He is Sethnakhte, first pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty, as portrayed in the tomb of Tawosret, wife of Sety II, in Biban el-Moluk (the Valley of the Kings) (Porter & Moss, "Topographical Bibliography", 2nd ed, Oxford (Clarendon Press & Griffith Institute): 1960-1999, vol. I, pt 2, p. 529).

The image is one of six such portraits in one plate forming part of a series representing the kings and queens of ancient Egypt, and is taken from the first volume of plates from Ippolito Rosellini's "Monumenti dell' Egitto e della Nubia", published in 1832. In the "Catalogue of Examples", Ruskin listed amongst the Educational Series '16. "Egyptian costume." B, C, &c., the same. Rosellini, Tavole, tom. i. pl. 17.' No. 16 is identified by Cook and Wedderburn (XXI.61) as figure 6 from pl. 17, presumably on the basis of Ruskin's instruction to 'draw the spotted head-dress very carefully'. However, the number of subsequent frames covered by Ruskin's '&c.' remains unclear, although his reference to the single plate in his catalogue entry suggests that they were all from one plate. It seems a reasonable assumption that all six images from Rosellini's pl. XVII were included, and they have been listed in the present catalogue accordingly, arranged arbitrarily on the basis of their sequence within the plate.

The plate was first catalogued by Ruskin in the "Catalogue of Examples" of 1870 (see above). However, it did not reappear in any of his subsequent catalogues, and so was not part of the collection transferred to the University in the Deed of Gift of 31 May 1875. As it can no longer be found, it is represented here by a plate from the volume in the Sackler Library of the University of Oxford.

In a note in "The Ethics of the Dust", explaining how the individual aspects of the Egyptian deities were still largely unknown, Ruskin was somewhat sceptical of Rosellini's qualities: 'for the full titles and utterances of the gods, Rosellini is as yet the only - and I believe, still a very questionable - authority' (Ethics of the Dust, note III = XVIII.363). In his entry below nos 176-180 in the Reference Series, Ruskin again questioned Rosellini's accuracy, noting that the colours were sometimes conjectural, 'slight traces of the original pigments, and those changed by time, being interpreted often too arbitrarily' (Standard and Reference Series catalogue, p. 22).