IN the first week of December the French national holdings of art between roughly 1848 and 1910 were put on show in the long-awaited Musée d'Orsay. The museum is the culmination of nearly ten years of unfaltering government commitment and dedicated curatorial team-work. It is now possible in one building to get some idea of what was happening in France (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) in the fields of painting, drawing and sculpture, opera design, architecture, photography, metalwork, furniture, ceramics and textiles, at a time when Paris was, for most of these activities, the centre of the world. And it is all housed in a handsome example of the late nineteenth-century building type par excellence, the railway station - Laloux's 1900 Gare d'Orsay. 

Graham Sutherland studied etching, under Stanley Anderson, at Goldsmiths' College from 1921 to 1926. This exhibition of Sutherland's early work, selected by Nannette Aldred, was organised as part of the celebrations marking the 150th Anniversary of the University of London (closed 3rd December). 

A general historical, as opposed to a fashionable, interest in ornament for its own sake seems to date from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and ever since almost every decade has seen the appearance of a new work on the subject. Many have been uncritical surveys and others have veered from the anthropological to the pyschological. This latest publication is one of the first to use the term dictionary and this approach, combined with the authors' terse definitions and sound erudition, makes it both highly valuable and, as usual with all collections of reproductions of ornaments, quite fascinating. 

An art that can be called American has existed for barely two hundred years. The first history of American art, by William Dunlap, appeared in 1834, less than a century after the birth of modern art history and criticism. While European art has been analysed with formalistic, iconographic, biographical, and socially historical methods, inquiries into the nature of artistic practice in America have been primarily formal, biographical or nationalistically cultural. Three projects have dominated texts concerned with art in America: elevating its importance, finding its indigenous qualities, and establishing artists' oeuvres. Recent publications depart only hesitantly from these interests. 

This well written and handsomely illustrated book deals with the most important contribution the Germans made to the gothic revival apart from the romantic movement itself: the completion of their gothic Dome and Minsters.

In 1698 the Englishman Matthew Prior wrote home, describing a visit to the gardens of Versailles with the Earl of Portland, William III's superintendent of gardens. Portland's tour of the gardens was led by Louis XIV himself. 'Whether it was a compliment to my Lord by His Majesty or a showing off of his grandeur, what matters? He made known to his Excellency that he had invented and arranged everything, that he had designed the plans, mis en diverses recontres les architectes a la raison, and because he had said this so often without being contradicted, in the end I think he begins to believe it.' The involvement of royalty in the design and even planting of their gardens was an old tradition. Renaissance writers often offered the authority of the Greek historian Xenophon, who quotes Cyrus of Persia regarding his garden or 'paradise' at Sardis that 'the whole of the measurement and arrangement is my own work, and I did some of the planting myself' (Oeconomicus, IV, 20-25 ). Xenophon later (V,1) notes Socrates's comment that 'even the wealthiest cannot hold aloof from husbandry.'

These three books are welcome and thought-provoking additions to the literature on Versailles in the time of Louis XIV. Berger's two are collections of essays highlighting aspects of the iconography and the architectural history of the chateau and garden. His approach, emphasising the contemporary events and politics which shaped so much of Versailles, will make these books appeal to historians as much as art historians. Although published separately, they were originally planned as one volume and should be read together for the fullest comprehension of the correspondences and differences betweeen the building and its surrounding park. They were not intended as a comprehensive overview, but instead as a detailed examination of various topics. 

This book is the authors' dissertation for the Goethe University at Frankfurt, written under the direction of Wolfram Prinz. As the title suggests, it is exclusively an iconographic study of the Farnese Gallery, and it takes as its point of departure Prinz's short study of the development of the gallery as a type in France and Italy. Her argument is that the gallery (and the loggia, the form of which it subsumes) is by definition equvalent in function and programmatic dynastic iconography to the sala grande. Here she neatly elides the question of what room it was Annibale Carracci was called to Rome to decorate; nor does she refer anywhere to one of his most important points of reference, the Loggia di Psiche in the Farnesina, which delighted Vasari for its depiction of priapic zucchini penetrating ruptured figs. The Farnese Gallery is a Reprasentationsraum, the history of which in practice and theory demonstrates that its decorative programme could, in the words of Prinz, 'have only one purpose: the glorification of the lords of the house.'

Christian Theuerkauff has produced the second volume in the series Die Bildwerke der Skulpturengalerie Berlin; the first of the new series having been completed on the Italian sculpture by Ursula Schlegel in 1978. Other volumes on the modern sculpture and the medieval ivories are also being prepared.

BRYSON'S Vision and Painting claims to provide a new approach to the study of the history of art by suppressing the conventional notion of painting 'as the record of a perception' and dealing systematically with 'the social character of the image and its reality as sign'. Though Bryson sets up his meditations as a radical alternative to Gombrich's Art and Illusion, many might feel that this was in part what Gombrich himself was up to.

SIR, Joany Hichberger's review of the Mulready exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum (September 1986) applauded it as 'a new model of the way in which complex ideas and information can be provided as a gloss to paintings without diminishing their status and impact', and described with approval the slow progress round the exhibition of visitors absorbed in the attempt to master the content of the 'rather didactic storyboards' and labels, which - to judge from my own observation - indeed took more of their attention than the exhibits themselves.