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

The drawing shows a view down a narrow street in Brig, towards the end of a building with a plain wall containing a doorway and a couple of small windows; a child stands in the street. The onion dome which rises above a square, pitched roof behind the foreground buildings is identifiable from its shape and fenestration as of the towers of the seventeenth-century Stockalperschloss and, if Cook and Wedderburn's identification of the scene is correct, the mountains in the background should be close to the Simplon Pass, to the south-east of Brig. The view is perhaps taken looking southwards along what is now the Alte Simplonstrasse.

The drawing is dated to August 1884 by Cook and Wedderburn, and this would fit with Rooke's known movements: Ruskin sent him from Ravenna to Brig in July 1884, and he was in Sallanches by 3 October. The two drawings which were in this frame may be those listed in Ruskin's Master's Report for the Guild of Saint George for 1884 as 'Two Streets in Brieg [sic], Valais', valued by Ruskin at £20 for the pair, and temporarily placed at Oxford (Master's Report, § 10 = XXX.80). Equally, though, the listed drawings may be two of the three studies made by Rooke in Brig in during the same trip and still in the collection of the Guild of Saint George (R.489, R.500 & R.550; see Morley, Appendix, 191-4). As noted by Cook and Wedderburn, there were no entries for nos 155-175 in the Standard Series in Ruskin's cataogues; this drawing was first recorded in the series in 1906.

Ruskin visited Brig many times. He noted, of another drawing by Rooke showing "The Lower Portion of an old House at Brieg [sic]", that 'This serves to illustrate the type of building which forms the home of the inhabitants in the old streets of the towns in Switzerland as distinguished from the picturesque châlets built for their residence among the mountains.... Here the domestic architecture, if it can be dignified by the term, is of the plainest construction of plastered walls, contrasting strikingly with the beauty of the balconied wooden structures that grace the mountain slopes.' (White, p. 442, in Library Edition, XXX.225.) Discussing two more Rookes, he noted that the dome of the Stockalperschloss was covered with sheets of tin, tarnished to yellow, and that this technique was 'characteristic of the local industry' (White, pp. 500 & 442, in Library Edition XXX.224).