The relationship between John Linnell and Samuel Palmer has not received the attention it deserves from art historians.  Even the main authorities on Palmer give a misleading impression in this respect: A. H. Palmer takes pains to minimise the artistic influence of Linnell on Palmer, while Geoffrey Grigson, writing some fifty years later, stresses the detrimental effects on Palmer of his friendship with Linnell during the Shoreham period.

John Gibbons (1777-1851) was one of the new breed of upper middle-class patrons in nineteenth-century England.  A wealthy although sickly ironmaster from Birmingham, he devoted his limited energies to acquiring an extensive collection of contemporary British art.

John Brett was twenty-seven when The Stonebreaker was exhibited in 1858.  He had trained at the Royal Academy Schools, and although he was not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he had been an admirer of their work for several years.

Two notes by George Vertue provide the documentary evidence about the early history of the Chandos Portrait, the only supposed portrait of Shakespeare with any claim to have been done during his lifetime.  Both were written while Mr Robert Keck, a barrister of the Inner Temple, was its owner.

The buildings of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, formerly the Naval Hospital and originally the site of a royal palace, are one of the supreme achievements of English architecture.  Although well known, it is necessary to outline some of their earlier history, before discussing two newly discovered drawings by John Webb for a grotto in the park behind.

The baroque portraitist John Michael Wright seems to have signed himself indifferently 'Anglus' or 'Scotus'  at the height of his career around 1670; but Evelyn called him a Scotsman, and Vertue was told that he had been born in Scotland, though he marked this information with a query.

One of Vanbrugh's letters among the Newcastle papers in the British Museum has perhaps so far escaped all eyes except those of H. M. Colvin because, although autograph, it is unsigned.  It concerns three topics: the split in the Whig Party in 1717 and the rôle of the third Earl of Carlisle as peacemaker, the recent marriage on 2nd April 1717 of the Duke of Newcastle to Henrietta Godolphin, and in the middle paragraphs 'your Heslington Lady'.

A portrait painting in oil attributed to Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) representing the artist's brother Richard Wright (1730-1814), surgeon, is at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.  This painting has so far escaped the notice of students of Joseph Wright's œuvre.

It is satisfying to supplement Rose Isepp's contribution to The Burlington Magazine of May 1979, in which she presents three newly discovered early portraits by Wright.  As she states, no actual paintings of 'sitters at Newark' listed by the painter on page 1 of his manuscript account book (illustrated in her article) had previously been known.