SINCE Chiswick House was taken into guardianship by the then Ministry of Works in 1948 a great deal of research has been undertaken to establish its place in architectural history. This has not concentrated, however, on the interior decorations or on its domestic use during the life of the 3rd Earl of Burlington. For many years it was assumed that Chiswick House was a 'temple of the arts' and used only infrequently by Burlington. It is the intention of this article to show, on the basis of previously unpublished documentary evidence, that the first floor of the house formed a suite of principal apartments to an old late- Tudor building, now demolished, and that to look at the present building without reference to its original contents and to its relationship to the Old House is therefore misleading (Fig.2).

EDWARD Smith-Stanley, the twelfth Earl of Derby, has long been recognised as one of the Adam brothers' most opulent patrons. As Lord Strange he commissioned the magnificent Féte Pavilion at The Oaks, Woodmansterne, Surrey in which some hundred and fifty guests were entertained two weeks before his marriage to Lady Betty Hamilton; and, as a fit residence for his bride, old Derby House in Grosvenor Square was reconstructed between 1773 and 1775. Both works offered examples of Adam taste at its most elaborate and both have now gone. The Fete Pavilion, though rumoured to have cost £5,000, was used for one summer's night and was then apparently dismantled. Derby House survived almost a century longer, until the succession of the Earl's grandson in 1869, who sold it to be demolished. Some fittings from the house were then transferred to New Derby House in St James's Square, from where a few appear to have moved again to the Oriental Club in Stratford Place. Yet these bits and pieces, even including the spectactular bow-fronted com-mode recently identified at Knowsley, are a poor substitute for what was once a sumptuous neo-classical interior. What Adam did for Lord Derby is now known only by repute or by the plates in the brothers' published Works.

IN recent years the researches of several scholars have done much to bring understanding to the complex activities of architects working on the erection of the great English and Scottish houses. While fully documented accounts de-voted to one house are rare, there is a growing awareness of the financial structure underpinning the fever of building which often gripped the landed classes. Fuller details than hitherto have also been published about the work of craftsmen of several trades, sometimes associated with the commissions of only one or two architects, sometimes ranging across a variety of skilled tasks for many masters. Numbered among these are the craftsmen who worked in wood, and specifically, as discussed in this article, some carvers of outstanding ability - Jonathan Maine of Oxford and his team, James Richards, Richard Lawrence and Sefferin Alken. Their contribution to the embellishment of the English country house in a period of about one hundred years (1680-1780) merits consideration, as they were leaders among the competent majority. Within the field of English interior decoration there is of course need to recognise the influence of foreign engraved sources, the infiltration of talented craftsmen from elsewhere in Europe, particularly painters, silversmiths and sculptors, and the standards set, if not always attained, by those employed on the King's Works.

IN the exhibition of miniatures held at what was then the South Kensington Museum in 1865 was a group from the collection of the Rev. William Vernon Harcourt (1789-1871). Ten in all, mounted in two frames, they included eight which had come from Penshurst Place. An inscription in the hand of George Simon, 2nd Earl of Harcourt (1736-1809) read: 'These miniatures came from Penshurst, and were given to me, by the Hon. Mrs Anson to whom they were bequeathed by her aunt the Hon. Lady Yonge'. These eight miniatures re-emerged after a hundred and twenty years in the aftermath of the exhibition, Artists of the Tudor Court at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1983 and are the subject of the present article. They form the greater part of a group which must originally have been in the possession of Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester of the second creation (1563-1626), and their subjects include some of the major figures of the Elizabethan age. As Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (1532?-1588), also figures among them, I shall for clarity refer to the Earl of the second creation throughout this article as Robert Sidney.

AMONG the 'modern performances' recommended to the attention of eighteenth-century English visitors to Rome by Edward Wright in his celebrated travel account of Italy were the apostles executed for San Giovanni in Laterano between 1705 and 1712. Praising their 'most magnificent appearance', he describes them as 'of the present age, but by the best masters in it, as Mons, le Grot, Camillo Rusconi &c. and some of them may justly be called very fine'. The appeal of Rusconi and Monnot for English connoisseurs and collectors has been demonstrated by Hugh Honour, but the extent to which the English were aware of Le Gros, Rusconi's principal rival for the position of foremost sculptor in late baroque Rome, is less well known. This note deals with Le Gros's reputation in this country and the appearance in England relatively early in the eighteenth century of his figure of Marsyas.

NEWBY Hall in North Yorkshire houses one of the most important private collections of ancient sculpture in Great Britain. The collection, most of it acquired in Rome in 1765 by William Weddell, remains intact, its eighteenth-century arrangement largely untouched. Having no children, Weddell, who died in 1792, bequeathed Newby and its contents to his cousin Thomas Philip Robinson (the third Lord Grantham, later Earl de Grey), from whom it passed through the Vyners of Lincolnshire to the present owners, the Compton family.

CHARLES Lennox (1701-50) succeeded his father as second Duke of Richmond and Lennox in 1723. He was a Whig aristocrat, close friend of the Duke of Newcastle; between them the two Dukes controlled most of the parliamentary seats in Sussex. The second Duke of Richmond was also a soldier and diplomat, playing a prominent role in the defeat of the Young Pretender in 1745-46 and acting as special envoy to Paris for a few months at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society (1724) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (1736), a patron of Canaletto and a keen builder. Perhaps the only great sorrow of his full and successful life was the elopement of his eldest daughter, Lady Caroline Lennox, with the budding politician Henry Fox (later Lord Holland) in 1744. Lady Caroline was twenty-one, Fox thirty-nine. Their marriage proved to be a lasting and happy one: they died within twenty-three days of each other in 1774.

IN the tragic sale of the Blenheim pictures at Christie's in 1886, two works by Carlo Dolci were bought back at unprecedented prices. The more expensive, the octagonal Madonna delle stelle, which reached 6,600 guineas, is no longer in the Marlborough collection, but the Adoration of the kings, which was knocked down at 940 guineas, has remained at Blenheim, hung high above a door on the public route, but overlooked by recent scholars (Fig.1, p.662). It is in fact one of the most beautiful of all Dolci's works and its distinction has now been confirmed by Herbert Lank's sensitive cleaning and restoration. Both Pas-savant and Waagen, who recorded that this picture was 'less affected and truer in feeling than usual', commented on the predilection of the English for Dolci, and thus it is particularly appropriate that a picture of this calibre by the artist should be publicly rehabilitated on the occasion of an exhibition devoted to English houses and their collections.