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

The examples we have hitherto reviewed have been chosen chiefly to illustrate the history and principles of art. For completion of the evidence they have given us I must now refer to the Standard Series, and I place in the remainder of the cabinets exercises for immediate practice and illustrations of the natural history and landscape which, as frequently stated in my lectures, I think the best subjects of art for amateur students. It is always to be remembered that this collection is prepared for the art-education of young people generally, and not at all as a means of professional discipline for the artist, whom, as often stated in my lectures, I expect to study in the academies of artists and not in mine. This first drawing of the series so selected, an early pencil-sketch by Turner, from nature, is made the introduction to everything in order to enforce on our students the first great law of practice, that unR. til you can manage the point of the pencil, you need never hope to manage anything else. Assuming, however, that the exercises which have been gone through during the study of the above described examples have sufficiently disciplined the students’, hand, he is to copy the cluster of trees on the left hand of this drawing as an introduction to landscape-sketching.