THE present-day traveller who leaves the Al for Worksop, then takes the Mansfield road and turns off on the B6042 for Creswell, will suddenly find his progress arrested by traffic-lights. These herald a single-file stretch of road which presents him, on either side, with a spectacular sight which nothing on the road he has so far traversed will have prepared him for: he finds himself driving through a gorge of grey limestone cliffs, overhung with trees and plants, deeply fissured and abundantly cavernous. These cliffs are Creswell Crags; their south face is in Nottinghamshire, their north face in Derbyshire. Nowadays the stream which runs between them is no more than a shallow trickle, in summer almost choked by water-plants into invisibility; and the caves which from circa 80,000 - 1,000 B.C. served as the dens of wild animals, and later of human cave-dwellers, are occupied only by bats. Creswell Crags remained largely unknown until the mid-nineteenth century; as late as 1813, the compilers of the Nottinghamshire volume of The Beauties of England and Wales, noting that Cresswell Crags are 'curious and worthy of notice, consisting of rocks torn by some convulsion of nature into a thousand romantic shapes', added that they 'are not often visited', since they lie 'out of the usual track of good roads'.

IT is both disappointing and disconcerting that the long-overdue first exhibition of cubist painting in Britain should have been The Essential Cubism at the Tate; disappointing because this narrow view of it diminishes cubism's achievement and prevented the showing of many of its seminal works, and disconcerting in the completeness with which the late Douglas Cooper was able to ignore the work done on cubism over the last ten years. In this period there has occurred a growing awareness of the complexity of the cubist movement and of the breadth of intentions grouped within it - in short, of the inadequacy, for any proper understanding of cubism, of any attempt to distil its 'essence', far less to insist yet again that this resides exclusively in the work of Kahnweiler's stable of artists. There is also some irony in the fact that this awareness has grown mainly in a generation of historians attracted to cubism largely by a work originally written as a thesis under Cooper's supervision, John Golding's History and Analysis. Indebted as many were to the scholarly integrity and thoroughness of Golding's attempt to situate the locus classicus of cubism in the paintings of Picasso and Braque, and to assess both the paintings of other cubists and the responses of their critics in terms of these, they were led by the questions which it left unanswered to see the short-comings of its approach. Although apparently unheeded by Cooper, there have appeared in the last decade several fresh analyses of aspects of cubism, which together have initiated a broad reassessment of its historical meaning and achievements.

'PRESSAGNY, 19th July 1861

My dear Lise... Manet left on Saturday evening. In the morning he and Ernest went to Les Andelys to see the church and the much acclaimed inn. We went to see Mr Fevrier in the afternoon; we got back at 4 o'clock and to pass the time until dinner Edouard made me sit for a sketch with Plydie on my lap.

... Greetings to your husband ... a big kiss for my little girl Your father     A. Adam'

These passages come from a delightfully affectionate, news-filled letter (Fig. 15; see Appendix I, letter 2), one of a hundred or so written from the 1850s by Ambroise Adam to his daughter Lise, mostly after her marriage and move to a new home as Mme Léon Gauthier (Fig. 14; see notes 7 and 10). The letter documents the painting of a little sketch portrait whose existence has never been recorded in the Manet literature, although a unique impression of an etching by Manet can now be recognised as a transcription of this oil sketch in reverse (Figs.10 and 11).

CLAUDE's Mercury stealing the flocks of Admetus from Apollo (Fig. 17) in the Wallace Collection was cleaned by Herbert Lank at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in 1978. The cleaning was relatively straightforward except for one passage - the figure of Apollo as a distracted herdsman with a dog - which provides the main subject of this notice. Both herdsman and dog were found to be alterations, made apparently soon after completion and by another hand.

IN 1932, in an article entitled 'Gasparo, fonditore veneziano', Leo Planiscig published an elaborate bronze candlestick, then on the Frankfurt art market and now in the Museo Poldi- Pezzoli, Milan (Fond. Crespi), which bears under its base the cast inscription GASPAR. MCLI (Figs.28 and 29).1 Reading, clearly correctly, the date as a mistake for MDLI, he surmised that this was the work of an unrecorded mid-sixteenth-century founder by the name of Gasparo, whom he assumed to have been Venetian.

THERE has been considerable speculation recently about the original setting of the Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, and implicitly of the panel produced in competition with it, Raphael's Transfiguration (Fig.32). It seems worthwhile therefore to bring forward a piece of evidence, which serves not only to exclude some recent theorising, but also provides ascertainable facts about the setting of Sebastiano's painting, and enriches our understanding of the artistic milieu in which both paintings were produced.

THE painter and architect Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-96) occupies a key position in post-Tridentine art. Yet the thematic and formal connexions linking his achievements in the various fields of art and in the divergent cultural traditions of Italy and Spain have never been adequately considered.

SCHOLARSHIP of the past decades has dispelled the mistaken assumption that Spanish artists of the seventeenth century drew only rarely and has shown that they, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, were prolific draftsmen, who produced sketches and finished drawings, if not always for their own sake, at least in connection with their commissions. Among the seventeenth-century Spanish artists who utilised the graphic medium as a preparatory means of working out painted com-missions was the Valencian-based artist, Francisco Ribalta (1565-1628).

DESCRIBED by fray Jose de Sigfienza as 'that great portrait painter', Alonso Sainchez Coello has rightly retained his reputation as such to our own day. Born in Benifayó, Valencia in 1531/2 (d. Madrid 1588) he trained in Portugal while under the patronage of Philip II's sister, the Princess Juana. Around 1550 he went to Flanders where he studied under Anthonis Mor van Dashorst, as a protege of Cardinal Granvela. Introduced to prince Philip by his sister, he was in the royal service from 1555, so that for over thirty years - for most of his career - he worked as court portraitist for Philip II. During this long service he must have produced a continuous supply of effigies, personal ones for his patron and the royal family, and official ones for distribution throughout the realm and abroad. In addition, there were commissions from noble courtiers, such as Don Luis de Haro, Marqués del Carpio, and Don Diego de Córdoba, Deputy Master of the Horse and visiting dignitaries such as Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Pacheco describes what amounts to a charmed existence, in which the painter and his family received and entertained royalty as well as the great personalities of the time.

1984 is the bicentenary of the death of Allan Ramsay, who died at Dover immediately upon returning from his fourth visit to Italy where, his great painting career almost forgotten, he had continued to promote his second calling as a scholar and man of letters. This year is also - so the evidence now available suggests, though older reference books give the date as 1685 or 1686 - the tercentenary of the birth of his father, Allan Ramsay the poet. To mark this coincidence of anniversaries the National Library of Scotland has mounted an exhibition entitled 'Poet and Painter: Allan Ramsay, father and son 1684-1784' (until 31st January 1985).

LORNE Campbell's recent article on Edward Bonkil (THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, CXXVI [1984], pp.265-74) provides a suitable occasion to introduce an early photographic view of Trinity College Church in Edinburgh (Fig.61), Bonkil's church and the original setting of the panels by Hugo van der Goes which are now in the National Gallery of Scotland. Taken by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, the photograph shows Trinity College Church and Trinity Hospital from the southwest, with Calton Hill in the background. This view has not been reproduced before in the literature on Hugo van der Goes, although it is illustrated in the recent catalogue of calotypes by Hill and Adamson in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.