THANKS to the very generous involvement of the Toshiba Corporation, a new Japanese gallery will open at the V. & A. in December 1986. The display will be in room 45, most recently occupied by the Rococo exhibition, and will be connected with the adjoining Chinese gallery by opening up an existing archway. Its estimated lifespan is twenty to twenty-five years.

'THE story of the beautiful is already complete - hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon - broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai - at the foot of Fusiyama'.
Whistler thus concluded his famous 10 O'Clock Lecture in 1885. It shows the central importance ofJapanese art for Whistler's aesthetics, but also that Hokusai was by that time a household name within the fashionable London society to which the artist was addressing himself on this occasion. However, the name of this Japanese master, who died in 1849 after about seventy years of artistic activity, was far from familiar twenty years before Whistler's lecture. Hokusai's name was probably well-known among those Westerners in the Dutch factory at Nagasaki who were keen collectors of ukiyo-e art. Indeed, Philipp Franz von Siebold credits some of his illustrations in his Nippon. Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan (1832-51) as 'Hoksai jap. del.'. Among Whistler's circle of friends it was William Michael Rossetti, the art critic and brother of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who mentioned the name 'Hoxai' for the first time in 1867. Even during the 1870s, when collecting Japanese art became fashionable, Hokusai was the only master of the ukiyo-e school whose name had any sort of currency in the West. Most Western collectors of Japanese prints before 1870, when this activity was still confined to a select few, had little idea of the name of the artist, let alone the date of the print.

MODELS are sets of propositions which organise data collection for the description of phenomena. This article will examine the implications of such models - or structures of thought, as some may prefer - in the understanding of the history of Japanese art. Beyond data collection, models permit the second-order generation of hypotheses about causation which may then, as a third order, permit predictions about how phenomena will behave. They allow us at the very least to chart historical development,I and, depending on the richness of our data and hypotheses, to forecast change usually through a post hoc rationalisation for change which has occurred.

ASSEMBLIES of nudes in a landscape were very fashionable in Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century, but their exact meaning often escapes the modern art historian. Scarsellino's little panels at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, for instance, are still imperturbably quoted as the Bath of Venus and Diana and Endymion, although the latter tells the tale of Salmacis chasing Hermaphroditus; and a lovely picture by the same artist, with maidens washing themselves in a pool, which turned up in London (Sotheby's. 15th July 1970, lot 162) remained stuck with the non-committal title of Bathing nymphs. It was only thanks to the captions of the corresponding etchings (known as Gli Amori dei Carracci) that four canvases recently returned to Paolo Fiammingo (Vienna, Gemaeldegalerie Nos.2360-63) could be identified as Four aspects of love. And now a new iconographical puzzle has come to the fore in a canvas (117 by 166 cm.) bearing the monograph MVP, which has been erroneously published as a signed work by Marco Angolo del Moro (Fig.39; Sotheby's, Monaco, 23rd June 1985, lot 118).

THIS notice draws attention to a volume in the Réserve Précieuse of the Bibliothèque Royale Albert I in Brussels (VB 5335), into which are bound thirty-three different component parts, all fitting broadly into the area known as engraved ornament. Most of the dated or dateable contents are later than 1610 and the latest date to appear is 1640. The book was probably put together in the mid seventeenth century for the Jesuit library in Mechlin (see Appendix). There are reasons to suppose that its composition may have had a consciously educational purpose.

RECENTLY re-emerged after being lost sight of since 1909 is the 1851-52 study for Ford Madox Brown's Waiting (Fig.64). Brown took it up and made it into a picture in 1854-55 with considerable retouching and the addition of a topical allusion in the miniature on the table of a soldier, away at the Crimea. He then renamed it An English Fireside of 1854-5. The more highly finished version, of the same size, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853 (private collection), having been painted from the study in 1852 but using a professional model for the head. The study was posed by the artist's wife Emma, both in 1851 and again in 1855; their daughter Catherine is sprawled on her lap. Emma had already posed for earlier pictures and was to appear in Madox Brown's most important works of the 1850s.