This watercolour almost certainly shows one of the towers at Fribourg in Switzerland, with an adjoining building forming part of the walls (c.f. the views of Fribourg of 1856 at Bembridge and of 1859 in the British Museum repr. P.H. Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin, 1972, pp.64 and 68). Ruskin visited Fribourg several times from 1854 onwards in connection with a planned series of illustrations for his own history of Switzerland in which, in particular, he sought to demonstrate the essential relationship between the Swiss towns and their surrounding landscape; he also visited Geneva, Basel, Thun, Baden, Schaffhausen and Lucerne for this purpose. He was also influenced by the Swiss views of J.M.W. Turner that he had seen as executor of Turner's estate. His first selection of Turner watercolours followed the route of his own favourite tour of Switzerland and by 1856 he saw his own views as a supplement to those of Turner. (For Ruskin's Swiss watercolours in general, and their relationship to his projected history and to the works of Turner see Walton, op.cit., pp.87-94.)