PORTRAITS of sculptors are by no means unprecedented in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. The degree of self-awareness which pervaded the painter's studio during these years is also in evidence in the sculptor's work-shop as sculptors began to obtain the status and financial rewards that signified success. Indeed, several of the leading sculptors of the day had their portraits painted at work; examples include Louis-Francois Roubiliac painted by Soldi modelling his figure of Charity for the Duke of Montagu's monument in Warkton Church, and John Michael Rysbrack, also depicted by Soldi, with the model for the figure of Hercules installed in the Pantheon at Stourhead in 1756.

IN the corner of one painting exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1858 (Fig. 14), two young girls build a house of cards on top of a book whose spine is labelled 'Balzac'. This fragile edifice is the most vivid symbol of the iconology of Augustus Egg's untitled narrative cycle of three paintings identified in the catalogue by the following passage: 'August the 4th. Have just heard that B-has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both their parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!'

To discover and be allowed to decipher what may come to be regarded as a Rosetta Stone for the artistic and domestic history of eighteeth-century England is something rarely if ever given to a researcher, and for which I shall always be grateful. I refer to the ledgers of Messrs Hoare, Drummonds (Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland), Barclays, Gosling Branch, the National Westminster Bank, and the Bank of England.

'THE account that Vertue wrote of Rysbrack modelling his terracotta Hercules (Fig.27) is well known. It is transcribed in the catalogue of the Rysbrack Exhibition at Bristol, while Horace Walpole's paraphrase was given by M. I. Webb. Writing in February/March 1744, Vertue said the sculptor 'proposed the Antique Hercules of the Farnese to be his rule of proportion, - but to make his Model standing but in a different attitude. & the limbs otherwise disposed -.' The body was modelled, part by part, from the strongest and best proportioned men, chiefly boxers and bruisers, that Rysbrack could find in London.

UNRECORDED or 'lost' drawings by Constable from almost every period of his working life have come to light in private collections or the open market during the last two or three years. Although each one has its particular interest, the following have been singled out for special mention.

A good number of works by Constable previously unknown to scholars have come to light in recent years. Rarely, however, do unsuspected groups of oil sketches by him reappear. One such was brought to the Tate Gallery for examination in April 1981. It comprises five sketches which had been given by Isabel Constable, the artist's last-surviving child, to her friend Alice Fenwick, née Ashby. Alice's father, Harry Pollard Ashby, was himself a landscape painter, exhibiting at the R.A. between 1835 and 1865, and had known Constable in the latter's final years. Various documents preserved by Mrs Fen-wick's descendants and by Constable's attest to their friend-ship. In a letter of 30th June 1836 Constable thanked Mrs H. P. Ashby for an invitation for his children to visit the Ashbys at their Wimbledon home and regretted that he could not come himself. A month later he inscribed an impression of the small Salisbury Cathedral mezzotint to Ashby. Hugh Constable, John's grandson, remembered Ashby telling him in 1884 'that he had painted with John Constable & seen him put in peeps of clouds through trees, afterwards'.

WHILE Egg's tragic trilogy of the dilemma of an unfaithful wife has attracted much attention (see this issue, p.202), the painter's other achievements raise some provocative issues about the mid-Victorian art scene. Like his friend Charles Dickens, Egg was concerned with the predicaments of poverty-stricken artists and participated in many of the novelist's amateur theatrical performances in the 1840s and 1850s, staged to benefit this cause. The cooperation among literary and artistic men in these altruistic endeavours, and the commissioning of a picture to honour this collaboration, is the subject of this study.