THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH artist Aelbert Cuyp (1620–91) is principally remembered today as a landscape painter and is especially associated with bucolic images of cattle grazing or resting in a sun-drenched idyll. However, this is a rather blinkered view of the artist’s range and his output was considerably more diverse. One aspect of his work that has long been overshadowed by the considerable reputation of his landscapes is his portraiture. Even his fellow townsman and contemporary Arnold Houbraken neglected to mention his activities as a portrait painter. While Cornelis Hofstede de Groot’s catalogue raisonné of Cuyp’s œuvre wildly overestimated his portrait production, listing almost one hundred, Alan Chong’s recent reassessment yields a much more modest harvest.

THE RISE OF Jean-Etienne Liotard’s reputation during the twentieth century was largely spurred by the opening of the Rijksmuseum’s new building in Amsterdam in 1885. In it twenty-two works by him were displayed – far more than in any other collection at a time when he was chiefly known for La belle chocolatière at Dresden. Two of them are now ranked among his masterpieces – the ‘snapshot’ View of Mont Blanc from the artist’s studio; and the off-centre image of a pensive woman in Levan­tine dress seated on an ottoman (Fig.12) – long identified as Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry – that is the subject of this article.

‘DEGAS ONCE TOLD me he considered it an artist’s duty to see his pictures properly framed’, recounted Louisine Havemeyer in Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector. Although a seemingly simple statement, it does not precisely clarify what Degas intended by ‘properly framed’. New evidence has come to light that elucidates Degas’s choices for the presentation of his work. Additional research also pays tribute to the particular sensitivity of Mrs Havemeyer, one of the greatest collectors of Impressionist art whose collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, contains one of the most significant groups of original frames.

HOWARD COLVIN played a central role in the development of architectural history in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. His Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, first ­published in 1954, provided the factual basis on which his contemporaries and successors relied (including John Summerson and Nikolaus Pevsner), while his scholarly example imparted new standards of academic professionalism to the discipline of architectural history.

ANNE D'HARNONCOURT, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, died on 1st June 2008 at the age of sixty-four. Born in Washington, Anne was raised in New York, where her father, René d’Harnoncourt, was director of the Museum of Modern Art. She studied at the Brearley School in New York, Radcliffe College in Cambridge MA and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which she received her master’s degree in 1967. In that year she came to Philadelphia as a curatorial assistant. In 1969 she moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, becoming assistant curator of modern art. She returned to Philadelphia in 1971, as the first head of a newly established Department of Twentieth-Century Art, and remained there for the rest of her life.