St. Sauveur

On the 1848 tour of northern France, John and Effie Ruskin travelled from Mont St Michel to Coutances, St Lô and Bayeux before reaching Caen on 22 September 1848, moving on to Rouen for the first two weeks of October. At Caen, Ruskin drew the church of St. Sauveur from a window in an adjacent café. This is one of two identical drawings: the other is in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. For the exhibition mounted in Boston by Charles Eliot Norton in 1879, Ruskin made a number of copies of some of his best drawings, being “a little afraid to risk” the originals on an Atlantic crossing.