Coal Merchant's House in Market Street, Croydon

This early study appears to have been executed when Ruskin was a boy. It depicts the view from his aunt's house in Croydon. In his memoirs Ruskin wrote of his early memories of Market Street and the influence it had upon his art: 'I will sum up once for all the places, and mark the times ... which thus formed my instincts and sense of nativity for ever. First - Market Street, Croydon, and its lovely rough wooden pump with rude stones around it, and tiled cottage roofs. Thence all my steady love of cottages, lattices, littlenesses, roughnesses, humilities ('The Works of John Ruskin, XXXV, Praeterita and Dilecta,' E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds., 1908, p. 609).