Among works in the Sheepshanks collection now on view in a renovated ground floor gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum is a group of paintings by William Mulready (178601863) which, by virtue of their size, medium (oil) and subject, exemplify the early Victorian taste in cabinet pictures. It is only in recent years that English nineteenth-century subject painting has attracted any serious attention from art historians. Mulready was praised by one French critic, when he exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, for 'de petits tableaus finement penses et executes avec beaucoup d'espirit'. This, however, was the most that could be said of paintings like The Wolf and the Lamb and The Butt both of which were on show in Paris. 

The Hogarth Club, an exhibiting society and social club was founded in April 1858 and dissolved in December 1861. Its members - divided into two classes of 'artistic' and 'non-artistic' - included painters, sculptors, architects, writers, collectors, professional men and their friends. Those who lived in London were termed 'resident'. According to W. M. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown suggested that the Club was named after William Hogarth, 'a painter who he deeply reverenced as the originator of moral invention and drama in modern art'. Holman Hunt confirmed that 'we fixed upon this name to do homage to the stalwart founder of English art'. 

Boydell's Gallery is the best-known group of Shakespeare paintings in English art and as such has formed the subject of a substantial body of literature. Less attention has been paid to other groups of artists, the Pre-Raphaelites perhaps being the most neglected in this respect. Yet they made a significant contribution to a tradition of Shakespeare illustration which had already been well-established in English art by such artists as Hogarth, Reynolds, Fuseli, and Blake. 

The circumstances in which Stubbs's famous composition Labourers was conceived are established by a widely quoted passage of Ozias Humphrey's account of the artist: 'At Southill the Seat of Lord viscount Torrington...'

THE EARLY years of the French Restoration (1814-1830) reveal a critical condition in the evolution of French painting. In this period of chaotic reversals in political allegiance the Napoleonic painter, committed to the programme of an Empire style, adapted his talents to the formation of a pictorial image palatable to the royal Bourbon house. 

Of all the phases of Gericault's mature career, his trip to Italy in 1816-17 is the worst documented, being known to us chiefly from the meagre evidence to be found in a few precious letters written from Italy to his close friend Dedreux-Dorcy in Paris. These reflect in moving depth Gericault's state of mind when he wrote them but are maddeningly uninformative about his movements and activities and about the abundant but hitherto understudied body of work which can be securely dated within his Italian year. Previously unpublished information contained in the archives of the French Embassy to the Vatican throws some welcome light on this obscure and crucial period of his brief career.