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

The print shows a young girl crouched on the ground, one arm around a small dog that lies beside her. It is set within a plain, fictive frame. She is Sophia Matilda (born 1773), daughter of Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and thus a niece (not, as Ruskin had it in his title, a daughter) of George III. Reynolds's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1774; it is now in the Royal Collection.

The print first appears in the collection in 1872, in the catalogues of the Rudimentary Series, where Ruskin listed it as no. 125, "A Daughter of George III, with her Terrier (Reynolds)", in the second section of the fifth cabinet, "Late Italian Revival, Spanish and English". It retained its position in the printed catalogues of the series, but does not appear in Ruskin's 1878 rearrangement. It was last recorded by Cook and Wedderburn, in 1906; the print could not be found by Hewison when compiling his 1984 edition of the Rudimentary Series catalogue. Consequently, it is represented here by an impression in the British Museum (accession no. 1941-12-13-598, state II in Chaloner Smith).

In his catalogue entry, Ruskin described the print as 'Consummate English art of the Revival'. He referred to it in his lecture on the relationship of organic form to art, delivered on 2 March 1872, comparing it to a print after Titian's "Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi" (no. 42 in the Standard Series) - considering the Reynolds 'much more delightful'. They stood there as examples of the practice of adding an animal to a portrait either to accompany or contrast with the human sitter - a practice which Ruskin deplored in modern art but felt was done with 'a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by them' by the old masters. (The Eagle's Nest, §§ 151-152 = XXII 224-5.)