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

Sketch showing the general colour of the above monument. Its red marble is slightly blanched by time and its white marble yellowed and more or less patched with black lichen - the general plan of it being, the roof of common grey limestone, the crockets, more or less worn away, of white marble, the cornice supporting the equestrian figure in red marble, as also the lateral niches, and the gable and cusps of the arch, while the two figures of Abel & Cain, the tree between them, the shield above and the panel-sculptures round the R. pointed arch are in pure white marble. I am ashamed of myself for ever having done sketches so thin & poor in tone as this, but it must be remembered that they profess to be nothing more than pencil memoranda washed with colour merely for information and not as a colour-drawing. To have painted the gable properly would have taken me at least a fortnight, and a fortnight was all I had to look at and form judgement of the architecture of all the town. Such as it is, every touch of the drawing is bestowed with care and, with the help of the photograph, will sufficiently explain the character of the monument.