In the fifth volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin noted that “the red and bare rocks of Mount Pilate, hotter, certainly, after a day’s sunshine than the cold storm-wind that sweeps to them from the Alps, nevertheless have been renowned for their helmet of cloud ever since the Romans watched the cloven summit, gray against the south, from the ramparts of Vildonissa, giving it the name.” One of his drawings of Mount Pilatus is shown below.

Tree Study at Vevay

‘August 10th.  VEVAY.   Long walk over the hills between here and the Dent de Jaman, remarkable for abundant springs and stoneless pasture with splendid pines; the latter on the higher hills distorted and thrown into grand excrescences of trunk, six or eight feet over, with two or three trees growing out of them.’   (Diary, 10 August 1846)

The aspen tree (above) held some significance for Ruskin, who first noted the “aspen’s quivering crest” in a poem written in childhood.  It was the tree he observed in a moment of revelation about drawing at Fontainebleau as a young man, and its depiction is often referred to in Modern Painters: volume IV (1856) includes engraved illustrations of it in natural and ‘idealized’ forms.

The drawing below was engraved as an illustration to volume III of Modern Painters (1856).  Ruskin uses it as an example of how to draw faithfully from nature. “First, I say that the whole trunk is dark, as compared with the distant sky.  Secondly, I say that it is rounded by gradations of shadow, in the various forms shown.  And, lastly, I say that (this being a bit of old pine stripped by storm of its bark) the wood is fissured in certain directions, showing its grain, or muscle, seen in complicated contortions at the insertion of the arm and elsewhere.”