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

Knowing thus the facts of structure accurately, the student will proceed to learn their value in Composition by choosing Forms for complete study which can be finished at his leisure. Any group of dried leaves, falling into beautiful arrangements, may be carried home from the Autumnal woods and drawn as carefully as we please. This piece of withered oak falls, as is constantly the case, almost exactly into the form of one of the terminal crockets in the Flamboyant Gothic of the French, which was, indeed, studied entirely from the Autumnal foliage of their forests. I have lost the drawing, to my great regret: but this proof of Mr. Armitage’s beautiful engraving does it more than justice, and deserves most honourable place in our Series as an example of English line-work, imitating even the freest touches of body-colour white in my sketch. A more or less characteristic R. example of the forms of architectural ornament, derived from the withered leaves and entangled or fallen branches of the Woods of Picardy, may be seen in the bracket under the statue of the Madonna, and the door-lintel beneath that, in 289.