A PAINTING called Translating the Bible, by an anonymous artist, was listed among portrait busts in an inventory of Wynnstay, Denbighshire, the ancestral home of the famous Welsh Maecenas, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn. The subject, a half-length figure, was apparently thought to be St Jerome, the saint known for the earliest Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. 

Two pendant paintings by Georges de La Tour of an Old Man and an Old Woman in San Francisco attracted relatively little critical attention before their inclusion in the large La Tour exhibition in Paris in 1972. Vitale Bloch first published them in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE in 1954 when they were in a Swiss private collection. They were acquired by the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1956 and were moved to the Place of Legion of Honor in 1973. 

THE Neapolitan activity of Mattia Preti, which was the fundamental phase of his career, included his decorations in the church of San Pietro a Maiella. Ten paintings in oil on canvas were inset into a richly carved and gilt framework on the ceilings of the nave and transept; they depict scenes from lives of Saint Peter Celestine and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. 

TROPHIME BIGOT remains an enigma for enthusiasts of Caravaggesque painting, as he was for Benedict Nicolson who, as one knows, strove with such fine constancy, sometimes amused, to group the oeuvre of a prolific 'Candlelight Master' whom he soon identifies as Bigot. He was not able to see the beautiful Marseilles exhibition which was devoted last summer to Provencal seventeenth-century painting, where ten paintings grouped under the name of 'Triophime Bigot' allowed us, for the first time, to compare the large canvases of the churches of the region with the 'nuits' painted in Italy.

SINCE the basic article by Benedict Nicolson on Bartolommeo Manfredi, several recent publications have renewed our acquaintance with this artist. Evelina Borea and Luigi Salerno have successively published paintings which Manfredi did for 'l' Altezza di Toscana' or Vincenzo Giustiniani. In 1974 a Company of Drinkers and Musicians was exhibited on the London art market, a work of the first importance for the understanding of what Sandrart described as the 'Manfrediana Methodus'. 

THE late Benedict Nicolson's definitive monograph on Joseph Wright of Derby and his Addenda to it have given us firm evidence of the painter's early portrait style; however, no actual pictures of 'Sitters at Newark', listed by Wright on page 1 of his MS Account Book were identified. Three portraits painted there 1759, have now turned up in the collection of a direct descendant of the eldest sitter, and research into them soon involves another family listed 'at Newark', the Rasdales or Rastalls. 

TO the growing list of Carlo Saracen's drawings can be added a preparatory sketch for his Burial of Icarus in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The painting (one of a group of six mythological pictures) and thus the preparatory drawing can be dated 1600-1608, during Saraceni's early years in Rome.