During their stay in Venice over 1851-52, Ruskin and his wife Effie attended the Radetzky Ball at Verona on 23 February and returned to Venice by the eleven o’clock train on 24 February. In a letter to her mother of 24/25 February on her return, Effie wrote that: '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 reaching Venice till five o’clock.'
1 There must have been a stoppage on the Verona-Vicenza-Padua-Venice line, Ruskin using the opportunity to make the present drawing.
In a postscript to a letter of 24 February to his father, Ruskin wrote that: "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.'2
We are grateful to Professor Stephen Wildman for his help when cataloguing this work.
1. Mary Lutyens (ed.), Effie in Venice: Unpublished Letters of Mrs John Ruskin written from Venice between 1849-1852, London, 1963, pp. 276-77
2. J.L. Bradley (ed.), Ruskin's Letters from Venice 1851-52, Yale, 1955, p. 197