RUBEN'S Landscape by moonlight in the Princes Gate Collection of the Courtauld Institute Galleries (Fig. 4) is unanimously agreed to be among the artist's latest landscape paintings. Its poetic effect of nocturnal solitude heralded a new and more subjective approach to nature which continued, to inspire artists in Great Britain where it has remained with a short intermission in the 1930s, for over two centuries. In his last year Rubens's powers of invention and originality in landscapes reached their peak; and the recent technical examination and cleaning of this painting by Robert Bruce-Gardner in the Conservation Department of the Courtauld Institute of Art (see the technical report, below) now allows the process by which Rubens arrived, at the finished effect to be revealed in all its brilliance. 

THE DECORATION of the Sistine Chapel ceiling comprises about one hundred and seventy-five picture units. There are nine scenes from Genesis along along the longitudinal axis; four Old Testament histories in the corner spandrels, seven prophets and five sibyls on thrones, forty ancestors of Christ in the lunettes and spandrels above, ten medallions depicting events from the Old Testament, and a multitude of nude figures adorning a fictive architectural framework. In most cases the subject of each picture unit is easily recognisable. 

THE 1986-86 exhibition The Treasure Houses of Britain at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, contained many fine examples of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, and the 'Dutch Cabinet Room' displayed a number of works by well-loved Dutch landscape painters. One winter scene, bearing the signature M Hobbema, caught the eye with the cool, pale mauves and greys of a frosty sky, reflected in the ice of a canal, and interwoven with the delicate kacy patterns of ice-encrusted tree branches (Fig. 33). The catalogue identifies it as the only known winter scene by Hobberma.

CASSIANO Dal Pozzo's patronage of Nicholas Poussin is extremely well known to art historians. As one of the most important antiquarian and amateur collectors of early Seciento Rome, he became one of Poussin's earliest patrons when the French artist arrived there shortly after 1623, and must have helped him obtain commissions from other Roman patrons. Cassiano (1588-1657) asked Poussin to participate in illustrating various parts of his famous Museo Cartaceo, and commissioned from him over fifty pictures, including the first series of the Seven Sacraments.

PHILIP DORMER, 4th Earl of Chesterfield - the Great Earl of Chesterfield- was one of the quintessential figures of the eighteenth century. His posthumous fame rests on the celebrated letters to his natural son, Philip Stanhope. But for contemporaries he was at once a considerable social figure, laughter at bedtimes but held in respect; a diplomat and politician who never perhaps achieved the power for which his evident erudition might have qualified him; and, not least, the builder