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

Recto: The text is written in alternating lines of blue and gold. A brown-robed, seated man seems to embrace a blue-robed woman in the three-line initial 'D'. There are five single-line illuminated initials, 'D', 'G', 'S', 'A' and 'B'. Three line-endings contain patterns. The border comprises bars of burnished gold, with stems of blue and pink ivy which grow into leaves of blue, red and gold.

Verso: The text is written in alternating lines of gold and blue. There are three single-line illuminated initials, 'E', 'P' and 'E'. Two line-endings contain geometric patterns. There are the remains of an indistinct grotesque figure in the upper left border. The border comprises bars of burnished gold, with stems of blue and pink ivy which grow into leaves of blue, red and gold.

One of thirteen leaves from the Hours of Yolande of Navarre. This leaf is number 44 b, containing the beginning of psalm 92, the first in lauds; it was originally located between folios 44 a and 45 in the manuscript.

The Hours of Yolande of Navarre are a Book of Hours of the use of Paris, created c.1353 and belonging to Yolande of Navarre (1326-1395), the widow of Henri IV, Duc de Bar, and of Philippe de Navarre, Comte de Longueville; they bear her arms of Flanders (or, a lion rampant sable armed gules within a bordure engrailed of the last) impaled with those of Philippe (in chief Navarre: gules, a cross, saltire and double orle of chains all linked together, or; in base Longueville: France ancient, a bend compony of ermine and gules). The manuscript (together with the Psalter and Hours of Isabelle of France, also in the Teaching Collection) was damaged when in the collection of John Boykett Jarman when his home in Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, was flooded on 1 August 1846 (not c.1854 as described by Ruskin). It was presumably still dismembered following its immersion when it was acquired by Ruskin, although Backhouse notes that Jarman may well have employed William Charles Wing (active 1835-1860) to repair and, in some cases, retouch his damaged manuscripts. Ruskin described the manuscript as 'in my own possession' in volume III of "Modern Painters", published in 1856 (vol. III, ch. xiv, § 27 = V.267). On 15 December 1872, Ruskin entered it as no. 6, 'Yolande', valued at £100, in a list of the manuscripts in his Oxford rooms which he compiled for insurance purposes (Bembridge MS 18, p. 129). Out of 176 leaves, Ruskin placed 13 in the Drawing School (none of them containing full-page miniatures), and gave 24 others away; the remainder of the manuscript was acquired by Henry Yates Thompson in 1902 and entered his collection as MS no. LXXXVI (to which was added 10 of the detached leaves, obtained from Miss Bradford, in 1910). It is now Yates Thompson MS 27 in the British Library.

The illumination was given by Cockerell to the third hand he identified in the Hours of Jeanne II, Queen of Navarre (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, nouv. acq. lat. 3145), who he postulated might be the Parisian illuminator Jehan Pucelle. However, Pucelle seems to have been dead by 1334, although the manuscript may well be attributable to one of his collaborators or followers.

Pages from the manuscript are first listed in the Teaching Collection in 1878, when Ruskin included one unidentified leaf from the book in his rearrangement of the Rudimentary Series, as no. 12. It was accompanied by a copy he had made of the folio and a water-colour of a spray of myrtle (both in frame no. 11, the copy later moved to no. 172 in the Supplementary Cabinet), 'in order to show the difference between illumination and painting'. The thirteen leaves catalogued here were first listed in the collection by Cook and Wedderburn in 1906, amongst the unframed items. As these were un-numbered, the individual folios have been given arbitrary numbers based upon the numbers marked on their back for the purposes of this catalogue.

A page from the manuscript (although not one of those in the Oxford collections) was reproduced as pl. 9 in vol. III of Modern Painters (= vol. V, f.p. 267), as an illustration of 'Botany of the 14th Century': Ruskin considered it one of 'the most graceful examples I have ever seen of the favourite decoration at the period, commonly known as the "Ivy-leaf" pattern' (vol. III, ch. xiv, § 27 = V.267).