Mountain Scene with Chalet Drawing
Mountain Scene (Alps?) with Chalet
Pen and ink, approx. ? × ? cm (image only).The editors of the Library Edition
describe the image as “a mountain scene, châlet in foreground”
(Ruskin, Works, 2:364 n. 1).
The original image that Ruskin may have copied is unknown, but evidence in the
List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account” (Table 2, Illustrations)
for the section “Strasburg”
suggests that this drawing may correspond to a proposed illustration that Ruskin entitled “The swiss cottages”.
The connection between Swiss cottages and Strasbourg in Ruskin's mind is the opening to the Black Forest. His poem
“Oh the morn looked bright on hill and dale”
focuses on the departure from Strasbourg and Kehl, leading into the Black Forest through the valley of the Kinzig River where it empties into the Rhine;
and his essay “It was a wide and stretchy sweep of lovely blue champaign”
marks the family's first view of that "celebrated thing", the "Swiss cottage". They were in fact encountering the architecture of the Black Forest house,
not the Alpine chalet, but British guidebooks similarly encouraged the perception of the Black Forest as "Swiss" in character (see the contextual glosses attached to
“Oh the morn looked bright on hill and dale”).
Whatever the source of Ruskin's drawing, it appears to depict an Alpine scene, not the Black Forest.