NICOLAS Poussin is so often regarded as a supreme exponent of classicism in Western art that it may seem wilfully perverse to claim for him also a significant place in the history of romantic painting. Yet Poussin painted one picture - the Deluge from the Four Seasons in the Louvre - which entitles him to just such a place; for this work inspired many of the best known tempest and deluges so popular with artists from Vernet to Turner, and was arguably the prototype of them all. 

NO contrast could be greater than that which made early Chinese painting history (i.e., before c. 1300) the product primarily of lower class artisans, hirelings of the well-educated Chinese aristocracy, which later painting history was created largely by the gentry itself, painting as amateurs in styles which eschewed the technical skills of the artisan. Looking backwards from an early seventeenth-century perspective, the influential painted and critic, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636), identified much of what was bad in Chinese painting history with professionalism and artisanship, while describing painting history as being carried forward toward its true ends by the literati amateurs. 

IN one of the best known of his few recorded pronouncements on art, Richard Wilson informed William Beechey that he admired 'Claude for air and Gaspard for composition and sentiment.' Scholars have analysed Wilson's relationship to Claude Lorrain at some length. His dependence on Gaspard Dughet, however, has proved more difficult to pin down. W. G. Constable, after pointing out certain vaguely Gaspardesque features in some of Wilson's landscapes, concluded that his interest in Dughet must have been 'neither deep nor permanent.'

IN a short note I published evidence to show that, far from collaborating with J. H. Mortimer on various landscapes as he was thought to have done, Richard Wilson was opposed to Mortimer's adulteration of his original compositions. This took the form of replacing some of Wilson's figures or adding new ones, to give a more up-to-date appearance to the picture for the purposes of publishing prints. In the case of the specific instance mentioned in the source, Wilson's Meleager and Atalanta, this was done at the request of the owner of the painting and published of the subsequent engravings, Robert Sayer. 

IN the late summer of 1819 Turner arrived in Italy for the first time, already versed in the character and topography of the landscape. His knowledge was due largely to the tutoring of Sir Richard Colt Hoare and to the work of John Robert Cozens, Claude Lorrain and Richard Wilson. The last had been very influential for Turner's first 'Italian' oils: of the four certainly attributed and painted before 1819, three are derived from and are stylistically close to Wilson's work. 

THE outstanding problem in Robert Adam's later career is the relationship between his architecture and the drawings and water-colours in his picturesque style of the 1780s. The bond between the two is made quite plain in an unexecuted scheme of 1774 for Barnbougle Castlle. It is reinforced by the identification of a group of scattered sketches for Kirkdale in the 1780s. The pattern outlined seems a general one and helps to explain the basic ideas of Adam's picturesque architecture.