WHEN the three founding fathers of the Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld, Lord Lee of Fareham and Sir Robert Witt, set up and endowed the Institute in 1932, they were certain of one thing: students of the History of Art should have the closest possible contact with works of art; indeed, they should live with them. All three were passionate collectors, and wisely believed that learned books, slides and photographs, essential though they are as tools of study - and Sir Robert Witt's vast collection of photographs and reproductions are proof of the importance he attached to them - must in the end be secondary to original pictures, drawings, sculptures or buildings. Hence each of them gave the major part of his collection to the Institute to be established as a Senate Institute of the University of London.

SIR Thomas Fairbairn was well know in Victorian England as a collector, patron and exhibition organiser. His friendship with Holman Hunt not only led him to commission such masterpieces as Woolner's Constance and Arthur (Fig.5) and Hunt's The Children's Holiday (Fig.2) but also influences his taste and the nature of his collection.

THE British Museum provided a unique source of reference for the nineteenth-century painter of classical subjects. Above all, it housed the Elgin Marbles, thought by many then, as now, to be the sublime manifestation of Greek artistic genius. They were, however, other objects to attract the painter's eye in the classical repository of Victorian Bloomsbury: since the eighteenth century, the vase-paintings had been used by artists as sources of information about dress, armour, furniture and many other details of ancient life, and in the next century vases came to be featured increasingly in historical painting, as objects in their own right.

THIS note is meant not as a new interpretation of David's Death of Marat, but simly as an observation which adds a new dimension to existing interpretations. More or less by chance, I came across an illustration of a marble relief in Edward Wright's account of his journey to France and Italy, 1720-22 (Fig. 37) which reminded me at once of David's Death of Marat (1793; Fig. 36).

THAT the half-French apostle of the English gothic revival Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) should early in his career design a French church is in itself highly appropriate. The commission was for the monastery chapel of the English Benedictine monks of St Edmund at Douai (Nord) in Flanders. The church, however, was later unacknowledges by Pugin and his critics.

IT has recently been established by John Murdoch and Mary Edmond in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, [May 1978 and September 1979] that the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century miniaturist previously known as 'L.', 'Lawrence' or even 'Lewis' Cross(e) never existed, and that artist was Peter Cross (c. 1645-1724). The initial confusion arose from inaccurate entries by George Vertue in his notebooks - entries sometimes copied almost word-for-word, as in the case of many other artists, by Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting. I shall now show that Vertue's 'Mr John Dixon' was also non-existent: here Walpole has added to the confusion by combining details given by Vertue about Nicholas Dixon the limner with those about 'John' Dixon, and attributing them all to the latter.

NOTHING certain is known about the death of Antonio Rossellino. I has been supposed that he died after 1478, the year he paid for the last time the annual tax in the Arte dei maestri di pietra e legname, and before 1481, when the Duke of Amalfi, who had commissioned the Adoration altar in S. Maria di Montoliveto in Naples was in negotiations with his heirs.

ONE of the most enigmatic of the problem pictures in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, is the canvas of a standing figure of an Angel with a guitar (Fig. 50). Acquired by John Bowes from the Condo de Quinto's widow in 1862 without an attribution, it was later described as 'Spanish Unknown, dated 1653'. But no attempt was made to decipher the inscription in the lower right foreground (Fig. 53), before Martin Soria's posthumous article of 1961.

THE unfinished oil painting by J. M. W. Turner currently exhibited at the Tate Gallery under the title Music party, Petworth (Fig. 55; Tate 3550, B. J. 447) was never exhibited during Turner's lifetime and consequently was never given a title by the artist, Its present title, identifying the setting as Petworth, was assigned by the National Gallery staff member who listed the picture, following its transfer to the Tate in 1919, for the 1920 catalogue of the Turner Collection. This the association of the canvas with Petworth, which has been accepted by subsequent writers on the subject, despite the fact that 'no actual room at Petworth [similar to that depicted in the painting] can be identified', has always been at best inconclusive.

SICKERT'S High Steppers (Fig. 59) is one of the many paintings that he based on photographs, from the mid-1920s until his death in 1942. Before the beginning of 1982, its exact source was unknown, and the subject, although accurately guessed at, had not been conclusively identified.