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

Placed here to show the proper treatment of heraldry in sculpture. The building is of three dates: its capitals, and the arches they bear, are Byzantine; the shields and casque, inlaid with modifications of the earlier work, presumably in the Fifteenth Century; the balustrade above barbarous Seventeenth. But nothing could surpass the beauty of the whole when I made this sketch in 1845; the lovely wild weeds being allowed to root themselves in the sculptures. Although I did not in 1845 know how to paint, the extreme fault of this and other drawings of mine at the time are owing to the fact that I was always working, not for the sake of the drawing, but to get accurate knowledge of some point in the building - which knowledge I always expressed securely first with the pen, however hard or bad the effect might be afterwards. Thus here I R. wanted the curves of the shield and casque, and the exact relief and method of their decoration. If you will look with a magnifying-glass at the bit of foliage in the front of the casque and at the door and window of the castle that surmounts it, you will see that the accuracy with which these are drawn was wholly incompatible with picturesque effect unless I had been John Lewis, instead of John Ruskin, and given my life to such work. But the pieces of yellow leafage above are freely and rightly painted, first with Chinese-white and then glazed. The bit of Oxford weed below is well indicated in form, though left too green in colour from mere hurry, and it will do any student good, in early stages of colour-study, to copy this casque with the leaves above and the two shields at each side of it. Of course the rest of the drawing is miserably hurried.