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

Sketch of the Staub-bach, slight, but yet useful, as an example of easy pine-drawing, and interesting in noting as state of the fall when the water is low, which, though often despised by travellers, is of exquisite beauty in reality; the water coming dark against the sky at its first drooping from the cliff and diffusing itself, as it were, into a fountain upside down. Note also in this sketch that the paper is left gray, though the water has to come dark against it, because the light in the drawing, if it had ever been completed, would have been on the snowy mountains beyond the lower cliff, which conquered sky and water and all. The quantity of work which is done in the part of this R. sketch which is done ought always to be enough, if well and deliberately applied, to express with sufficient refinement all the form and colour necessary in a sketch. The lower subject in this frame is a memorandum of an exquisitely beautiful sky of English make. The forms of the clouds are those which I had continually in sight at sunrise and sunset in my early youth, being characteristic of South England and North France; their delicacy being partly dependent always on windy and unsettled climate. This sketch was made from the Crystal Palace Hotel, the brown stain on the right being of course London smoke. The crimson of the clouds is raw and unsatisfactory, but if the student will draw skies till he does them as well as this, he will know how to do them better, and perhaps be more fortunate than I in having time to use his knowledge.