Known prominently as an art critic and patron, John Ruskin was also a gifted and skilled draftsman and watercolorist of the Victorian era. Copley Fielding, who was the president of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, became Ruskin’s teacher in 1834, instructing him on close looking and aerial perspective. In Ruskin’s 1843 book, Modern Painters, he claimed that modern landscape painters, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner, were superior to the Old Masters of the Renaissance, for they profoundly understood nature. In 1848 he married Effie Gray, but their marriage was notoriously unhappy and annulled in 1854, and she later married the artist John Everett Millais, who had been Ruskin’s protégé. Ruskin taught at the Working Men’s College, London, beginning in 1854 and was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, giving its first eight-lecture series in 1870. Between 1856 and 1857, Ruskin reviewed the vast collection of drawings in the Turner Bequest, preparing selections for exhibition at the Marlborough House in Pall Mall, where the National Gallery’s British paintings were on view.¹ He wrote The Elements of Drawing (1856–57) and other essays, giving instruction on developing drawing fundamentals through increasingly difficult exercises before working in watercolor.² As a draftsman, Ruskin recorded his intellectual and emotional engagement with his subject matter. He chiefly encouraged close observation and the understanding of nature, acquired through “the act—indeed, the art—of seeing.”³
 
Ruskin traveled extensively in England and on the European continent. He had successive tours in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Scotland beginning in the mid-1840s, establishing his own drawing style. He first visited Venice in 1835 and 1841 with his family and returned several times throughout his career, including two long winter visits in 1849–50 and 1851–52, which resulted in his renowned book The Stones of Venice. During his Venetian stay with his wife, Effie, in 1851–52, they attended the Radetzky Ball at Verona on February 23, returning to Venice by the eleven o’clock train on February 24. In a letter Effie wrote to her mother upon their return she relayed, “We started for Venice at eleven . . . and were a pretty large party altogether . . . and chattered away very agreeably. . . . A Tube broke in front and we were kept from Venice till five o’clock.”⁴  Ruskin must have taken advantage at the stoppage on the Verona-Vicenza-Padua rail line to sketch this sheet. The drawing has an immediacy and shows his artistic awareness of Turner’s work, as seen in the handling of the sky.⁵ Ruskin wrote in a letter to his father on February 24, “We had a delightful journey from Verona. I never saw Italy look more lovely—the snowy mountains against soft blue sky—and the purple hills below them clear in the early sunshine of the spring.”⁶ Ruskin took much pleasure in Turner’s “rough sketches,” what he termed “delight-drawings,” which were outlines taken directly from nature and colored from memory. They were spontaneous, intuitive, and unpolished, and he admired their emotional directness.⁷ Ruskin’s drawings during the 1850s convey such an approach, becoming visual records that stray from conventional means of composition and are more evocative and irregular, as seen in this watercolor. —Dena M. Woodall