LACK of evidence has long made it difficult to arrive at an accurate assessment of the extent of picture owning in sixteenth-century England. Relatively few pictures survive, particularly from the first half of the century, and the majority of these are portraits. The absence of documents prevents us from tracing back to sixteenth-century English ownership many other pictures: for example, of the numerous pictures in the collection of Henry VIII scarcely any can today be identified. Many pictures, especially religious ones, have been destroyed.

IN this note we set out the evidence for believing that the artist who signed miniatures in the middle of the seventeenth century with the monogram DG was not an artist called D. Gibson but was Richard Gibson, familiar to students of the period as a miniature painter, as a dwarf at court, and as the father of Susanna Penelope Rosse. Our task of proving the negative hypothesis that D. Gibson did not exist is difficult - it is always easier in the mind to multiply entities than to reduce their number - but at least we can say that the documents of the period contain no references at all to a separate D. Gibson. There is no record of a birth, a marriage or a burial; no evidence of his living where a successful miniaturist would be likely to live; no mention of him in letters or account books. On the other hand, there is plenty of such information about Richard Gibson, whom we know to have been a miniaturist but for whom we have no works before 1660, exactly the period of the signed DG works.

IN 1832 the papers and studio records of Johan Zoffany were destroyed in a bonfire, following the death of his widow from cholera. The fabric of his biography is thus a threadbare affair, and, though much of his work survives, auction records of the time bear witness to an astonishing number of lost works.

WHEN Thomas Shotter Boys left London for Paris in 1823, he did so as a trained line engraver seeking employment in a metropolis that offered little native competition and considerable commercial encouragement. By 1825 he had befriended Richard Parkes Bonington, who is credited with having turned Boys's attention from engraving to water-colour painting; for his part, Boys was instrumental in introducing Bonington to some of the leading reproductive engravers in London, in particular the talented family of Boys's first master George Cooke. Although the careers of both artists and their mutually beneficial relationship, which lasted until Bonington's death, have been studied closely in recent literature, precious few documents have survived attesting to this friendship. 

THE Holbein drawing labelled 'Ormonde' is one of the most impressive in the royal collection. Its subject is striking in physique; its treatment is bold and brilliant, with large unbroken areas of red and black water-colour. For many years (indeed probably since the eighteenth century) it has generally been taken for granted that the sitter was Thomas Boleyn, father of Anne, Henry VIII's second Queen. Boleyn had already been created Viscount Rochford in 1525, but as his daughter climbed further into the King's affections, so the father advanced in the peerage, becoming Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond in 1529. The Earldom of Ormond he could claim through his grandfather, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, who had died in 1515 without male heirs; while the Earldom of Wiltshire had also been briefly held by the Butlers (then hotly Lancastrian) in the middle of the fifteenth century.' 

THE generous loan of a group of paintings from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle to the National Portrait Gallery in 1979 included Elizabeth I when Princess and Edward VI. The pictures were hung in a newly opened small gallery, which afforded an excellent opportunity for close study. Oliver Millar points out that both portraits are without doubt by the same hand. Identical treatment of the silk patterned with metal thread woven in a raised looped pile used for both undersleeves and forepart of Elizabeth's petticoat may be seen in the curtain behind Edward. Roy Strong suggests that the pictures are both by William Scrots in his capacity as painter to the Crown in succession to Holbein.

IN 1959 Hugh Pagett was able to identify from the arms displayed on it, that a portrait on panel depicts William Carey (1497-1528), gentleman of the privy chamber to King Henry VIII and husband of Mary Boleyn. The painting also carries the date 1526 A.D. and the age of the sitter, thirty.With this evidence Hugh Paget proposed that it was in fact painted in England in 1526 and very probably by the Flemish painter Lucas Hornebolt who arrived here about that time. He pointed out that the dating would make it 'a remarkably early one for an English portrait'.