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

The lithograph shows a series of Greek deities. From left to right, they are: Dionysus wearing a vine-wreath, Hermes with his caduceus, Hera clutching a spear, Zeus holding his thunderbolt, and, according to Lenormant and de Witte, Hestia and Ariadne. It reproduces the decoration of a black-figure hydria then in the collection of the Prince of Canino. The print was plate XXII in the first volume of Lenormant and de Witte's "Elite des monuments céramographiques", published in 1844. It was presumably taken from Ruskin's copy of the work now preserved in the Ruskin Library (inventory no. 1996B2621), which is missing many of its plates.

The print was first catalogued by Ruskin in 1871, when it appeared as no 23 F in the Educational Series, accompanying a series of plates from Lenormant and de Witte in Case II, "Elementary Illustrations of Greek Design". It remained in the same position, although renumbered as no. 44, in the 1874 catalogue of the series, but does not appear in Ruskin's 1878 reorganisation of the series.