THE occasion for imitating a fresh series of Van Dyck studies is the recent and highly successful cleaning at the Hamilton Kerr Institute of the William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury belonging to the Fitzwilliam Museum. This version,  which was to be catalogues for the Museum in 1960 by H. Gerson and J. W. Goodison as 'studio of Van Dyck', had been bought by Charles Ricketts and C.H. Shannon as Lot 267 in an anonymous sale at Christie's on 30th January 1920. There was and is no hint of its earlier provenance, other than a paper label than was stuck on the back.   

THE influence of the church and the rise of the aristocracy contributed to advancing literacy and forming extensive libraries in Italy in the seicento. In Genoa,, texts on medicine and law, orations for coronations and family achievements, and poems by Ceba, Chiabrera and Tasso were printed in greater number and illustrated with elaborate prints. These frontispieces and thesis pages ordered at the time for their complicated programmes and arcane meanings are of interest today because they present a side of an artist not usually considered. 

FOUR manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales contain portraits of Chaucer. The earliest is the famous equestrian portrait in the Ellesmere manuscript (Huntington Library Ms.26.6.12 Fig.40) painted in 1420 at London or Westminster, and the possibly for thomas Chaucer, by an artist who did not draw any of the other, smaller pictures in the manuscript. This figure of Chaucer, astride his horse and somewhat cramped by his position in the outer margin, is capped and gowned in sober woollen, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a breast pendant (perhaps a penner or an ink-horn); aged about sixty, with greying hair and forked beard, he sits easily - though drawn out of proportion - upon his horse. 

IN May 1981 the Walker Art Gallery acquired Joos van Cleve's Madonna and Child with angels, which was formerly at Lulworth Castle. Both the top right and top left corners of the picture are new additions, implying that it originally had a curved top. With the exception of a few irregular scratches which have been repainted, mainly on the figure of the Virgin the surface is in an excellent state of preservation. 

IT is a decade since this Magazine carried an article which surveyed Frye's artistic output other than the well known mezzotints, and his possible role as designer while manager of the Bow porcelain works. Since then the writer has noticed a number of other works by Frye, which have re-emerged from obscurity or else been recorded in well substantiated references. 

In a letter to C. R. Leslie of 5th February 1828 Constable stated that he had been accused to Sir William Beechey of being 'a man who is always engaged in writing for newspapers.' Such an allegation to a senior academician, with its possible corollary that the accused wrote puffs for himself, must have seemed to threaten Constable's long deferred hopes of election of full membership  of the Academy. 

SCHOLARS have recently been working on artists associated with John Constable (notably his son Lionel), with the consequence that a rather clearer idea of Constable's own art is coming to be defined. The Huntington Art Gallery has acquired a sketchbook which, as an Appendix to this Notice shows, contains copies after Constable sketchbooks and drawings dating from 1813, 1816, 1817, 1820, and possibly 1821.