WHEN, in 1977, I started to compile a freshly researched and fully revised catalogue of the known authentic paintings by Paul Gauguin - which in some two years' time will be published under the innovatory title Catalogue des Tableaux Certains de Paul Gauguin by the Wildenstein Foundation in Paris - I found not only that I had to straighten out and amend the long-term consequences of false scholarship, unjustified claims, documentary confusion, erratic dating and stylistic contradictions, which had been accumulating unchallenged for sixty years, but also that I had to look for some fifteen authentic, well documented paintings by the artist which had apparently slipped from view and which Georges Wildenstein and Raymond Cogniat in their so-called Catalogue Gauguin, published in 1964, had written off, for the sake of convenience, either as 'Disparu' or by simply ignoring them.

DELACROIX'S earliest commissioned paintings, the Vierge des Moissons (1819) for the church of Orcemont and the Vierge du Sacre-Coeur (1821) for the Dames du Sacre-Coeur in Nantes, have received little attention among scholars, since they admittedly have not equalled the level of his mature work. The Vierge du Sacre-Coeur actually disappeared not long after its completion, and was referred to variously in the nineteenth century as the Triumph of Religion and the Vierge des Douleurs. Nevertheless, in my view these works, especially the Vierge du Sacre-Coeur have an intrinsic interest and significance both as instructive examples of Restoration religious politics and as revealing personal expressions. This paper will in particular consider the following questions: the commissioning and disappearance of the Vierge du Sacre-Coeur as reflections of Restoration Mariolatry and the evolution of the preparatory sketches as an index of the artist's stylistic maturing.

THE literature devoted to Felicien Rops is considerable: his career has been recorded, his graphic work catalogued, his technique analysed and the character of his art described. However, two aspects of his work have been neglected: neither the origin of some of his most typical subjects nor his contribution to the continuity of nineteenth-century art has received detailed attention.

A portrait of a buxom young lady by Gericault, already intriguing in its visual appeal, has excited fresh interest in recent years with speculation that the sitter might be the artists young aunt and mistress, Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel de Saint-Martin. Charles Clement catalogues it under the years 1818-20 as the portrait of a model called 'la grosse Suzanne', who lived in the rue de la Lune. 

IT is a well established that were of principle Japanese prints prime importance for the development of late nineteenth century painting and decorative art. It is therefore of considerable interest to know exactly when and under what circumstances these prints first came to be known in the West.

THE names of Turner and Callcott, recently brought together in a small exhibition at the Tate Gallery, have already been linked in this journal in a brief account of Callcott's painted copy of Turner's of the Thames and the Medway in Washington. Callcott's interest in Turner's work had, however, begun considerably earlier than 1807, when, as we may now be fairly certain, that painting was shown in Turner's Gallery. As Callcott put it in an account of Turner which he contributed to his so-called Dictionary of Anecdotes, 'His were among the very first works I rushed to on the opening days of the coming exhibitions and invariably have I kept to my faith and admiration for his talents'. Callcott was in fact considered a reliable source of information about Turner as early as 1799, for there also survives among his papers a draft of a letter describing Turner's Academy exhibits of that year, including the lost Fishermen becalmed previous to a Storm, Twilight and Battle of the Nile.

INCLUDED in the lady Hamilton  exhibition at Kenwood in 1972 was a large canvas of somewhat unusual dimensions, catalogues as george Romney's Thetis pleading with Achilles before Troy. Yet, according to the provenance, the painting was sold in 1908 under the title of Mars and Venus having been identified in the previous century as Aeneas rescued from Achilles by Venus and assigned to Sir Joshua Reynolds. More recently, apart from subject, the authorship of this problematic history piece has again been questioned:as lot 13 in Christie's sale for 2nd April 1971 it was entered simply 'G. Romney', and scholars at the Yale Center, where the work is now housed, likewise voice their doubts. 

A. W. N. PUGIN made two separate designs for Downside Abbey, Somerset. The full sets of drawings signed and dated 1839, 1841 and 1842, have recently come to light: previously known only from the perspective published by Pugin in the Dublin Review of February 1842, they comprise his first monastic design and one of his largest church schemes.1 Although some work began on the second scheme, one of Pugin's most ambitious and romantic dreams, the internal politics of the English Benedictine Congregation brought it to a stop.

THERE are no obvious medieval precedents for the design of two of the best-known monuments of the Gothic Revival in Britain, George Gilbert Scott's Albert Memorial in Kensington and the slightly earlier design by Thomas Worthington for the Albert Memorial in Manchester. Although nineteenth-century critics compared them to the Eleanor Crosses, they are fundamentally different, in their details as well as in their form, which is that of an open canopy enshrining a single statue rather than a solid structure incorporating several figures at a higher level, in niches. Nor need there be a straightforward connection between the two Albert Memorials, as has sometimes been assumed, since both Scott and Worthington were using a form which had been established twenty years earlier with George Meikle Kemp's monument to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh. The canopied statue was however still unusual - it had temporarily fallen from favour after 1850, when monuments of this type were used to commemorate the protectionist politicians Henry Handley and Lord George Bentinck' - and both architects were aware of the novelty of their choice.