THOSE who have studied the work of Rops have always known that he owed many of his ideas to Baudelaire, whose notions of the omnipresence of death and the pernicious nature of women made a deep impression on the younger man. The fact that he also adopted the poet's conception of la modernité has received less attention, although it played a considerable part in his work as well as in his correspondence.

EDWARD Bonkil, who, in association with James III and his queen, appears as donor in the Trinity panels by Hugo van der Goes, has remained a rather mysterious figure. Little was known about his life, and nothing about his family, and it has been impossible to decide whether he alone, or he and James III, commissioned the panels from Van der Goes.

OF the pretexts Lucas Cranach the Elder devised for his depiction of feminine beauty, Venus with Cupid the honey-thief is one of the most frequent. In their catalogue Friedländer and Rosenberg list some twenty-seven versions, by the father, by his workshop, or by the younger Lucas.

IT comes as no surprise that The galleries of the Palais-Royal by Louis-Léopold Boilly (Fig.16), originally exhibited at the salon of 1804, depicts prostitutes. However, Boilly's choice and treatment of such a subject - particularly for a painting destined to hang in the salon carré of the Musée Napoléon - are remarkable for an artist working in early nineteenth-century France.

ON 30th December 1823, Delacroix noted in his journal: 'J'ai vendu ces jours-ci à M. Coutan, l'amateur de Scheffer, mon tableau execrable d'Ivanhoë.... Le pauvre homme! et il dit qu'il m'en prendra quelques-uns encore; je serais d'autant plus tenté de croire qu'il n'est pas émerveillé de celui-ci.' There can be no reason to doubt that this was a picture which passed for 150 frs. to an unknown buyer in the L. J. A. Coutan sale on 9th-I0th March 1829, when it was described in the catalogue under lot 49 as 'Sujet tiré d'Ivanhoë, roman de Walter Scott. Ivanhoë blessé et malade se fait rendre compte par la jeune Juive de l'attaque que l'on fait du chåteau où il est renfermé.' (The scene occurs in Chapter XXIX of the novel.) The following lot was Delacroix's well known Woman with parrot, dated 1827, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Lyon, and both pictures were described in the catalogue as 'd'une belle couleur'.

WALTER Howell Deverell (1827-54) exhibited The banishment of Hamlet at the National Institution in 1851. The picture, by far the most thoroughly reviewed painting of the artist's short career, was subject to much critical abuse. As with many of Deverell's works The banishment of Hamlet went unsold and was eventually destroyed in a fire while still in the possession of the Deverell family. Deverell is also known to have completed a preparatory study for the painting, but Until recently it was assumed that this drawing too was lost.

THE precept that one should never take anything for granted is as true for the art-historian as for anyone else. A late picture by Turner incidentally demonstrates the value of such distrust, for, as a result of unthinking credence having been paid to the earliest identification of its subject, the work has been misunderstood and this, in turn, has led to further difficulties. The painting in question belongs to the Yale Center for British Art. It was certainly not sold by the artist and thus never titled by him. It has always been thought to represent Monte Rosa in Italy, although it depicts a very different location altogether, as will be seen presently.