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

The print has been trimmed to within 10 mm of the plate-mark. There are a series of white dots within the image, many of which seem to coincide with small elevations on the print's surface, and are presumably the result of slight abrasion; otherwise, it is in reasonable condition. The plate seems not to have been wiped entirely clean before the print was pulled, as there is a definite tone to the backround behind the lettering - which also shows light rocker marks in places, having presumably not been fully burnished before printing.

Dr Armstrong is shown half-length against a plain, dark background.

Cook and Wedderburn (XXI.27 n.1) identify the sitter as John Armstrong, M.D. (1709-1779), by all accounts an indolent and misanthropic individual who combined the twin activities of physician and poet in a somewhat unsuccessful career. The young Ruskin quoted a phrase from his poem on "The Art of Preserving Health", published in 1744, in "The Poetry of Architecture" (§ 43 = I.38).

The print was first listed in the Teaching Collection in 1870, when it was included in the "Catalogue of Examples" as no. 44 in the Reference Series, a position it retained in the 1872 catalogue of the series. The print formed part of a sequence of pictures by painters - all portrait-painters - who applied paint broadly, using the edges of the painted areas to denote outlines, rather than drawing them in with the point of the brush (Catalogue of Examples, p. 19).