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

Recto: a white, oval bowl decorated with blue lines, placed upside down and seen obliquely from above. The surface on which it sits has been sketched in with broad strokes of brown watercolour. Beneath the watercolour and bodycolour can be seen a network of ruled graphite lines, organised around two horizontals and two sets of orthogonals receding to points beyond the upper left and right corners respectively, which define the perspective construction of the drawing. A crudely-drawn rectangle is indicated in graphite, defining the area to be made visible through the mount, approximately 14.5 x 17 cm.

Verso: a cream-coloured tub with two vertical lugs sits on a blue-green surface, seen obliquely from above. It is contained in a similar perspective construction to the bowl on the recto, although on the verso this is not level, but tilts down to the left.

According to Taylor, this perspective drawing, its companion in the frame, and those in frame 215 of the Educational Series, were made by Ruskin during a period of intense work on the Teaching Collection in the spring of 1871. They do not appear in the "Catalogue of Examples" (1870), but are listed in the first catalogue of the Educational Series (1871) in Case IX, 'Illustrations of the Connection between Decorative and Realistic Design', as nos 2 and 2 A. They remained in the same positions in the 1874, although renumbered 214 and 215 respectively, but are not mentioned in the 1878 reorganisation of the series.

Taylor relates the drawings in frame 214 to problem XIV, 'To draw a Truncated Circular Cone', in Ruskin's "Elements of Perspective" (XV.287-289), although they do not seem to have been intended as direct illustrations of that particular text.