TOMMASO Righi fashioned funerary sculpture and stucco decorations for the richest, most powerful organizations and men in eighteenth-century Rome. His reputation has since declined into relative obscurity. Filippo della Valle trained him, the Roman economy supported him - at least for a while - and he spent his last years at the court of King Stanislaus Poniatowksi in Warsaw. There he died in 1802, at the age of seventy-five.

'Si les plus fameux Graveurs de son tems ont rendu son nom & les leurs immortels par leurs belles Estampes, on peut dire qu'ils lui doiventl a meilleure partie de leur gloire, en ce qu'ils ont trouvé des Originaux où ils n'ont rien eu à deviner, & où tout étoit rendu avec la derniere précision'. The fine engravings after Hyacinthe Rigaud's portraits were a legend even among his contemporaries, as is revealed by this sentence from his obituary (or the first account of his life) written by his godson, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont and published in the Mercure de France, in November 1744.

REYNOLDS's portrait of Susannah Love, Mrs Francis Beckford (Fig.28) in the Tate Gallery is, like the slightly earlier portrait of Anne Eliot, Mrs Hugh Bonfoy (Fig.31), closely based on Van Dyck's portrait of Lord Russell (later first Duke of Bedford) in the well-known whole-length double portrait with Lord Digby, at Althorp (Fig.30). Not only is the upright, slightly curving triangle of the pose, set in a single shallow plane, taken from this picture, but the distribution of light and shade on the upper part of Mrs Beckford's figure has been carefully contrived to match that on Russell's. For instance, Mrs Beckford's low, straight neckline echoes the horizontal formed by Russell's falling collar, and the fashionable deep lace ruffles on her sleeve have been arranged to follow the pattern of the cloak over Russell's forearm.

IT is well established that William Hogarth gave support and encouragement to other members of his profession. In particular, his involvement in the Engravers' Copyright Act (1735) testifies to his desire to advance their cause. A document which has come to light in the Public Record Office shows his practical aid at the level of individuals.

UNTIL recently the holograph by William Hogarth, University of Illinois Library Ms. Q.701/H67d (see Figs.34 and 35, and Appendix I), did not appear to be more unusual than any of the artist's manuscript notes and autobiographical fragments contained in the British Library collection. As Michael Kitson observes concerning the artist's idiosyncrasies of style: 'False starts, repetitions and ellipses are spattered over almost every page. Sentences continue for a dozen lines at a time, subordinate clause packed within subordinate clause, all without punctuation marks or capital letters. The reason is not a striving for rhetorical effect but the pressure of the writer's emotions. The same frenetic process is evident in this manuscript, with its frequent cancellations and emendations, its inconsistent use of capitals - some heavily inked as if bearing the weight after an uncertain moment in the writing. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Hogarth's hand is the curious mixture of bold strokes (the small 'd' almost always ends with a high flourish) and barely legible terminal letters (the final 's' receives only the faintest hint, making it sometimes impossible to determine whether the singular or plural is intended). Purchased from Stonehill of New Haven in 1980, this manuscript had been in the Herman W. Liebert collection (apparently acquired from a New Jersey autograph dealer, now deceased, in the 1950s) and identified as a rejected draft from the Analysis of Beauty (1753), though for some reason it was not published in Joseph Burke's definitive edition of this work, which included an appendix of all the rejected passages known at the time. Neither did it appear in Kitson's publication of other Hogarthian manuscripts, mostly from the artist's final years, 1761-64.

IT is an astonishing fact that until the National Gallery pur-chased the portrait of the Dutch patriot Jacobus Blauw (1756-1829)1 in July of this year, there existed no painting by David in any British public collection. The bulk of the artist's work is of course in France. The Louvre alone owns over thirty paintings, but there are also at least fifteen paintings by David in American collections, comprising both portraits and history paintings, and including the full-length Napoleon in his study, which until it was exported in 1951 was the only significant work by David in Britain.