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

The view looks down over the ruins of Habsburg Castle and the Aar valley; the Wildegg can be seen in the distance.

Although Ruskin visited the Castle in May 1858 and made sketches there, Hayman proposes a date of 1863, when Ruskin stayed in Baden for a week and may have made an excursion to Habsburg; he notes that the sweeping view from a high position is similar to drawings made by Ruskin at Mornex at about this time. Cook and Wedderburn and Taylor, however, settle for a date of 1858, the former identifying it with the sketches mentioned by Ruskin in a letter of 28 May to his father (XVI.lxxii).

The drawing was first catalogued in the Drawing School in 1871, as no. 8 J in Case XII of the Educational Series, which was devoted to 'Rocks, Water, and Clouds'. Although renumbered, as 299, it remained in the same place in the 1874 catalogue of the series.

In his Cambridge inaugural address, Ruskin described the castle at Habsburg as 'the centre of [Switzerland's] feudal power ... the hawk's nest from which the Swiss Rodolph rose to found the Austrian empire' (§ 16 = XVI.190); lecturing his Oxford students on 3 March 1870, he explained how images of buildings such as the castle could serve as a substitute for images of the great men of history (Lectures on Art, § 115 = XX.106).