IN the annals of nineteenth-century British portraiture a triumvirate of celebrities might well dispute the martyr's crown. Wellington summarised his own predicament, which was rivalled only by that of Queen Victoria and Sir Walter Scott, in a letter of 1834 to his friend SirJohn Beckett who had asked him to sit for a portrait: 'I have not promised to sit for less than a score of portraits. No portrait painter will copy the picture of another nor paint an original under fifteen to twenty sittings, and thus I am expected to give not less than four hundred sittings to a portrait painter in addition to all the other matters I must attend to.' David Wilkie, in an attempt to reassure the beleaguered and importunate Haydon, supplied the necessary caveat a few years later: 'He told me the Duke complained of the loss of time sitting occasioned. "Yes," said Wilkie, "but he would be mortified if he was not asked to sit." The earliest scholarly iconography of Wellington listed over one hundred likenesses, excluding the derivative and mass-produced images which proliferated on snuff-boxes, fans, door-stops, clocks and barometers. The most recent survey, while making no claims to comprehensiveness, enumerates over two hundred. Of the private ventures, the most ambitious was probably the commission for a monumental statue in marble awarded to Thomas Campbell in 1828 by the 5th Duke of Buccleuch.

BESIDES being texts - works of literature or of reference - books are, clearly, physical things. Their obdurate materiality and monumentality was, indeed, one of the striking features of the impressive series of book reliefs produced by John Latham (b. 1921) between 1958 and 1967. Yet, paradoxically, it was precisely the objecthood of books which Latham's use of them set out to question. His proposal was that we should cease to regard the world as a collection of things and think of everything as events with different time-bases

IN the collected papers of John Thurloe, the Secretary of State under the Protectorate, in the Bodleian Library, there survives the original Spanish passport of John Michael Wright, the English painter, signed in Brussels on 22nd May 1655 by the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Low Countries. It requests assistance from all officials during Wright's visit to England where he was commissioned to seek out and purchase works of art. Because of the previous lack of contemporary evidence concerning the early years of this important Restoration painter, this brief formal letter is valuable as it offers documentary confirmation that the painter had indeed entered the service of the governor as a valued artistic adviser. It will be recalled that after studying in Edinburgh with the Scottish portraitist George Jameson, Wright, who was a Catholic, had travelled to Rome about the year 1644, and by 1648 had entered the Academy of St Luke where he met such famous contemporaries as Velazquez and Poussin and also benefited by the unrivalled collections of classical art available in the city. After a decade of artistic enrichment he travelled to Brussels in 1654, where his talents were recognised by the archduke who, as the younger brother of the Emperor Ferdinand III and cousin of Philip IV of Spain, had the financial resources to indulge a passion for the collection of paintings and the study of antiquities. He was only three years older than his gifted English adviser.

THE Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest has recently acquired a painting representing Saints in glory (Fig.21). Previously considered to be an eighteenth-century Austrian or German work, it can now be clearly identified as an oil sketch by James Thornhill, related to his fresco at the east end of the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford. The fresco itself was removed in 1870, but its history, appearance and the preparatory sequence for it are well known: it was discussed in an article by John Sparrow and in additional communications in this Magazine in 1960.

ALTHOUGH Reynolds's draughtmanship received some attention at the Royal Academy's large Reynolds exhibition in 1986, and at the smaller one at Plymouth in 1973, it has still, perhaps, not received its due attention. After these Exhibitions it is instructive to re-assess his early artistic inclinations from four schoolboy drawings which also provide an illuminating foretaste of his life-long habit of borrowing from earlier prints.

A portrait in the Fraunces Tavern Museum, New York has recently been identified as one of Joshua Reynolds's earliest commissions. It was purchased at auction in 1985, at which time an old lining obscured the reverse. The painter was unidentified, and it was then believed to be a portrait of Abraham DePeyster, an influential political figure of colonial New York City whose name appeared on a label fixed to the stretcher which accompanied the detached canvas. The sitter has now been identified as Walter Kendall, the town clerk of Plymouth in the early eighteenth century (Fig.35).

IN the catalogue to the 1986 Reynolds exhibition at the Royal Academy,John Newman re-examined the suggestion, first made by A.N.L. Munby, that Reynolds's 1764 portrait of Lord Cardross (Fig.40) was the specific object of Nathaniel Hone's attention when Hone included a print labelled 'Van Dyke' in his Conjuror which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1775. That Van Dyck's portrait of Paul Pontius (Fig.38) was indeed Reynolds's source is confirmed in some autobiographical notes made by the sitter, David Steuart Erskine, when 11th Earl of Buchan, in 1794. The notes were compiled by the Earl from his diaries and add interesting, if at times slightly confused, light to our picture of Reynolds's relations with his sitters. There is a postscript to the encounter between the two men which marks a small milestone in eighteenth-century British and American painting.

SIR Joshua Reynolds owed much of his early success to the support of the leading families in the neighbourhood of his native Plympton. Among these, the one with which he retained closest relations at the peak of his fame was the Parker family of Saltram. The second John Parker (1734-88) who was elected Member of Parliament for Bodmin in March 1761 and then (having resigned that seat) Member for Devon County in May 1762, inherited Saltram in 1768. He was created Lord Boringdon in 1784. His first wife, Frances Holt, died in the year of their marriage, 1764, in Naples. He married again, in the year after he inherited Saltram, taking as his second wife Theresa Robinson.

AS one might expect, the reviews of the Royal Academy exhibition in 1803 were full of admiration for would-be history painters. The works of Sir Martin Archer Shee, John Opie and Richard Westall were especially praised, but the disparaging remarks of the sour critic in the Weekly Dispatch are perhaps stronger than most twentieth-century readers are willing to accept.

THE discovery of missing works is surely the most exciting part of compiling any catalogue raisonné. Among those that have come to light during my research towards a catalogue raisonné of the works of William Holman Hunt are the paintings and drawing published here for the first time (Figs.45, 46 and 47).

Even a few years ago, a three-day sym-posium on so specialised a subject as the conservation of wall-paintings would have been attended only by its practitioners. This July, however, an international con-sort of scientists, architects and art historians were invited as speakers and 'discussants' to just such an event, held in London (13th-16th July) under the joint auspices of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Courtauld Institute Centre for the Conservation of Wall-Paintings and their directors David Park and Frank Preusser. This interdisciplinary confluence reflects a growing interest in conservation. Disasters such as the Florentine flood, the dramatic campaigns to clean mural masterpieces by Michelangelo, Leonardo and Masaccio and rapid developments in conservation science have revolutionised attitudes towards the preservation of images and monuments in general. The proceedings of the symposium will be published in due course, but the subjects discussed and the conclusions reached warrant preliminary comment.