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

Somewhat foxed; the Ruskin Drawing School's stamp is showing through from the verso in the bottom right. A set of scribbled graphite lines along the left and top of the image, and partially and faintly down the right of the image, were presumably intended to indicate where the window-mount should be positioned.

The print shows a painting of a lion, patterned with spots and two rosettes. The original is in the Tomb of Khnumhotep III at Beni Hasan (Porter & Moss, "Topographical Bibliography", 2nd ed, Oxford (Clarendon Press & Griffith Institute): 1960-1999, vol. IV, p. 145). The print was figure 1 of plate XXII in the second volume Rosellini's "Monumenti dell'Egitto e della Nubia", published in 1834.

The print was first catalogued by Ruskin in 1871, when he listed it in frame no. 108 in the first Educational Series catalogue, calling it "Lion..., as solar power... Egyptian". It shared the frame with a print of Apollo and Phlegyon, and lions and gryphons, from a black-figure amphora, and was placed in Case VII, "Elementary Zoology. Lions.-Birds.-Serpents". It remained in the same position in the 1874 catalogue of the series (albeit renumbered as no. 158), but was not mentioned in Ruskin's 1878 reorganisation of the series. Cook and Wedderburn's description of the frame as containing 'Three coloured plates' presumably treated the other print as two separate plates: it shows two separate bands of decoration, although they clearly share a border (XXI.89 n. 1).

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).