RACHEL, widow of Elysée de Beaujeu, seigneur de la Maisonfort, was Paris born, the elder daughter of Daniel de Massue, seigneur de Ruvigny, by his first wife. After nine years of widowhood, she married on 18th August 1634, at Charenton the place of her baptism, a man five years younger than herself, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of Southampton. Soon he brought her to London. Lord Con-way on 9th November wrote to Lord Wentworth: 'My Lady of Southampton is come to this Town, she is very merry and very discreet, very handsome, and very religious, she was called in France, La belle & vertueuse Huguenotte, and to my Lord of Southampton's great joy, she is with Child. The child, Charles, born on 6th June, died on 20th November 1635. A second boy, Henry, was shortlived, dying at Paris aged about five. There were no other sons. A daughter, Magdalen, likewise died in infancy. Two more survived to marry and beget children: Elizabeth, wife from the end of April 1661 of the Hon. Edward Noel; and Rachel, wife from about 1653 of the Hon. Francis Vaughan. Rachel the mother 'dyed upon Sonday last in Child bedd', as John Eyre reported to the Earl of Rutland on 25th February 1640. She was aged 37.

THE origins of Wyndham Lewis's fascination with interiors can be traced back to an early stage in his development. Time and again his first attempts at fictional writing dis-play a peculiar alertness to the places his characters in-habit. But so far as his work as an artist was concerned, the drop-curtain and large murals he painted for the Cave of the Golden Calf gave him his first chance to put this interest into pictorial action. Although he worked on the decoration of the Cave in 1912 as one member of a large team, Lewis was enormously stimulated by the part he played there in transforming an enclosed space. Over the following year he developed this side of his work still further, and his involvement with the Omega Workshops encouraged him to think in terms of providing decorations for interiors. Indeed, Lewis's abrupt departure from the Workshops stemmed from his frustration at finding himself unable to take a leading role in creating the Omega room at the Ideal Home exhibition. The making of Kermesse for the Cave of the Golden Calf had convinced Lewis of his ability to produce monumental paintings in a public setting, and when his new work went on view at the Dor6 Galleries in October 1913 Clive Bell prophesied that Lewis would go on to create 'vast organisations of form, designed, I would imagine to have something of the austere and impressive unity of great architecture'.

IN Nollekens and his Times John Thomas Smith relates how a Mrs Mathew had introduced 'young Flaxman to the late Mr Knight of Portland-Place, who became his first employer as a sculptor. For this gentleman he modelled a statue of Alexander the Great.' A series of notebooks in Kidderminster Public Library substantiates this claim and identifies the patron as Edward Knight (1734-1812) of Wolverley House, Worcestershire. Moreover, a number of works by Flaxman identifiable in these notebooks can be traced in the records of the 1945 auction of the contents of Wolverley House. Edward Knight was a senior cousin of Richard Payne Knight and one of the foremost collectors in the late-eighteenth century of coins and medals, old master drawings and paintings, vying with his cousin in the first two fields and far outstripping him in the last. However, Knight's dealings with Flaxman were exceptional and, apart from his brother-in-law, Colonel Copleston Ware Bampfylde, an acclaimed amateur painter, there was no other artist with whom he seems to have struck up such a sympathetic and longstanding relationship. Scholars this century have either misidentified the patron in question or cast doubt on Smith's whole account.

EUROPEAN drawings of the live Indian rhinoceros are of extreme rarity before 1739, when London welcomed its second living specimen. That there had been earlier drawings from the life can be deduced from the woodcuts of 1515 by Dürer and Burgkmair, both based on a drawing sent from Lisbon; and the same is true of the rare print of 1586 by Philip Galle, inspired by a drawing from Madrid. But none of these has survived. The sole exception is an unpublished watercolour in a volume of dated and signed drawings almost certainly prepared for the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. It was, therefore, of significance for the iconography of this curious animal when James Byam Shaw kindly drew my attention to a drawing attributed to Watteau in a private collection in Paris (Fig.28).

IN 1924 Lady Victoria Manners and G. C. Williamson published an English translation of an Italian manuscript belonging to the Royal Academy of Arts. This manuscript, entitled Memoria delle pitture fatte d'Angelica Kauffman dopo suo ritorno d'Inghilterra che fu nell mese d'otobre 1781 che vi trovo a Venezia, is a memorandum of paintings made by Angelica Kauffman after her return to Italy from England where she had lived since 1766. The manuscript consists of a list of works arranged chronologically by month, year, and place, beginning in December 1781, in Venice. Each entry includes the subject of the painting, a description, name of the patron, price, and manner of payment and delivery. In the case of history paintings the literary source is frequently identified. Manners and Williamson described the manuscript as having been written in Kauffman's own hand, and as being thus a reliable source for attributions, provenances, and identification of subjects. Indeed this document provides an invaluable account of the artist's years in Italy, including information on the identity of portraits and allegories as well as her contacts with clients throughout Europe and England. Since its publication the Memoria delle pitture has been a primary source of information for all subsequent works on Kauffman.

ROSA BRETT was born in 1829, the oldest child and only girl in an Irish family of five children, the second of whom was later to become known as John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter. Their father was an army officer, which caused the family to remove from Dublin to Kent in Rosa Brett's early life, there to remain; the Kentish countryside was her main inspiration throughout her life. Scant information about her early life has come to light, though the Brett family archives contain several sketches from an evidently juvenile hand, one dated 1843 and one dated 1845. However, she emerges as a recognisable individual only in 1851, in the diary that she started on her twenty-first birthday, 7th December 1850: by this date she must have been drawing and painting for some time (whether with the benefit of instruction or not, is unclear), as had her first brother John, for the first diary entry reads.