Following his graduation from Oxford in May 1842, Ruskin set off for a family holiday in Switzerland ( Works, 3.xxiii). As he was later to recall on 10 March 1844, in a letter to his tutor, the Revd Osborne Gordon, it was on a Sunday at Geneva (see diary evidence concerning Sunday 12 June 1842) that the family received a paper from London containing a review of the Royal Academy:
it put me in a rage, and that forenoon in church (it's an odd thing, but all my resolutions of which anything is to come are invariably formed, whether I will or no, in church - I scheme all thro' the litany) - that forenoon, I say, I determined to write a pamphlet and blow the critics out of the water.... I put off my pamphlet till I got home. I meditated all the way down the Rhine, found that demonstration in matters of art was no such easy matter, and the pamphlet turned into a volume. Before the volume was half way dealt with it hybraized into three heads, and each head became a volume. Finding that nothing could be done except on such enormous scale, I determined to take the hydra by the horns, and produce a complete treatise on landscape art. ( Works, 3.666)
(See long gestation period of Modern Painters I, Ruskin and Turner, Ruskin and religion, Rhine.)