THE Antwerp geographer and humanist, Abraham Ortelius (1527-98), is well known today as a friend and patron of Peter Bruegel the Elder. It is less often observed that he also valued highly the work of observed that he also valued highly the work of Albrecht Drürer and maintained friendships with a number of Netherlandish artists. Ortelius's perceptive appreciation of Peter Bruegel appears in his Album Amicorum, a collection of eulogies, portraits and emblems compiled by his friends; but in addition to this he wrote entries to the engraver Cornelius Cort, the etcher Frans Hogenberg, Filips van Winghe and included the portrait of Lambert Lombard.

FIFTY years after the sale in Madrid in 1585 of paintings belonging to Philip II's disgraced Secretary of State, Antonio Pérez (Fig. 16), collectors were still seeking to obtain works of art which he had once owned. Such was the renown of the collection that on 19th Januaru 1636, the Earl of Arundel wrote to Lord Aston, British Ambassador in Madrid, 'to entreate yu that if yu meete wth them for me, accordinge to what I recommended unto yr LoP formerly concerninge any matters of Arte, for wch I will willingly lay out money.'

ONE of the most important pictures ever to come to the National Gallery of Scotland was put on view in August: the Marquess of Bute's noble Saenredam, Interior of St Bavo's Church, called the 'Grote Kerk', at Haarlem (Fig. 29). It was bought from Messrs Agnew with the help of major grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the National Art-Collections Fund and the Pilgrim Trust. Lord Bute, fully aware of the fragility of the panel, had exercised the strictest control over its travelling to exhibitions, and the occasion of The Orange and the Rose at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1964 (No. 65) was the only time in recent years that the picture had been seen in public.

AT the end of her catalogue of Boeyerman's paintings, M. L. Hairs mentions a Wild boar hunt bearing his monogram and dated 1677, known only from a reference to a Brussells collection in 1893. It is undoubtedly the painting examined in the present note, one of the painter's last works, completed shortly before his death the following year at the age of fifty-eight (Figs.31 to 34).

A grime-encrusted canvas stored in a branch of the Manchester City Art Galleries has turned into something of a phoenix. For the picture, showing Christ healing the sick and formerly listed as 'English c.1830-45', has now been cleaned, revealing the signature of Januarius Zick (1730-97), and the date 1773 (Figs.35 and 37).

THE Städtisches Museum, Mönchengladbach (Fig.39), was founded early this century but the building to which it moved in 1982 is its first purpose-built home. Small though Mönchengladbach is by comparison with the cities which house most famous modern art museums, this new building must be considered their equal in terms of its originality and of the intensity with which it enables art to be viewed.