Rooke first visited Auxerre in 1886, having been sent by Ruskin to record mediaeval carving and architecture for The Guild of St George. Having seen Rooke’s watercolours from that trip, Ruskin wrote: ‘Let me congratulate you in the most solemn way on these glorious drawings – Nothing since Turner’s death has ever given me so much pleasure, and the pleasure these drawings give me, will be shared by all the good world.’

Rooke returned to Auxerre in 1903, after Ruskin’s death, and made this luminous watercolour of the anonymous 13th-century carvings beside the leftmost door of Auxerre Cathedral’s west front. These depict scenes from Genesis, with the Creation to the left of the door, and the story of Adam and Eve with Noah’s Ark (our picture) to the right. It was exhibited at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1903, where it attracted several favourable notices: ‘a careful and beautiful drawing of its kind’ (Westminster Gazette), ‘an extraordinary piece of faithful realism’ (The Graphic). Ruskin had hired Rooke from Morris & Co., where he worked as a designer. He was Burne-Jones’s studio assistant for thirty years, from 1868 to his master’s death, but was also an accomplished artist in his own right who exhibited regularly.