IN THE GROUNDS of Cliveden House, a National Trust property in Buckinghamshire, is a little-known monumental bronze group of the Rape of Proserpina (Figs. 1-3). Brought to England from Rome by the 1st Viscount Astor in 1896, it has since then graced the parterre at the end of the formal garden behind the house, though neglected by visitors and art historians, who have concentrated on the collection of sarcophagi in front of the house and the marble statues on the balustrade below the terrace. Cliveden Hotel, which has recently restored the house and grounds to their former Edwardian splendour, has commissioned research into the large collection of paintings and sculpture there; these were gathered in the main by the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Sutherland during their occupancy between 1849 and 1869, and by the 1st Viscount Astor between 1893 and 1904, and are now dispersed around the interior of the house and grounds.

THE MONUMENT by Peter Scheemakers to Henry Petty, Ist Earl of Shelburne, at High Wycombe is among the largest and most costly monuments to have been erected in an English parish church in the eighteenth century (Fig.20). It is also one of the most elaborate representations of an aristocratic family on a monument from this period; but although it has long been recognised as one of Scheemakers's most ambitious works, the history of the commission and the formulation of the monument's imagery have received little attention. The recent identification of two alternative designs for the project - one by Taylor and another by Roubiliac - together with the survival of an unusually large amount of documentation now allow the circumstances in which the monument was produced to be reconstructed and questions about its function and range of meanings to be raised.

THE recent discovery of Roubiliac's terracotta model for the monument to the Earl of Shelburne (Fig.23) and the conservation of it undertaken for the Royal Museum of Scotland have made it possible to compare its technical features with those of the signed terracotta for the monument to the Duke ofArgyll (Fig.25). This has also been the subject of detailed investigative conservation. The similarities of technique and construction employed for both support the attribution of the Shelburne model to Roubiliac and provide new evidence about his technical procedures.

CELEBRATION of the military glories of the Napoleonic period raised fewer problems in mid-nineteenth century Britain than in France, where the Napoleonic legend had explosive dynastic implications. The continuation of work on the Emperor's mausoleum at the Invalides through three consecutive regimes, and the project's inception in the politically uncertain atmosphere of the latter days of the July Monarchy, combined to make this one of the century's more troubled decorative schemes. Of the many sculptors involved in it, Carlo Marochetti was to suffer the most from the constant revisions to the scheme. Although he was compensated for losing the tomb commission itself (Fig.30) by receiving another for an equestrian statue of the Emperor, repeated disagreements over characterisation and siting ensued, and the order for the statue was finally countermanded. While the substantial dossier in the Archives Nationales devoted to the wrangles over this statue contains  no reference to the matter,1 it is probable that Marochetti in part provoked these difficulties himself by simultaneously giving his attention to another equestrian statue, that of the Dukeof Wellington (Figs.38 and 39), which was inaugurated in Glasgow in October 1844. The Glaswegians used less tact than their French counterparts. It was openly asked whether it was acceptable for Marochetti to work concurrently on the two monuments, and this was only one of the questions raised. The Wellington commission, as we shall see, was not free from intrigue and polemic. In retrospect, however, these may have appeared to Marochetti anodyne enough compared to the labour-intensive concept shuffling over the Napoleon monument, for in 1849 he decided to settle in Britain.

BECAUSE of the extreme rarity of gothic ivory reliefs which can be dated with confidence to before the end of the thirteenth century, any addition to the known corpus is a document of  some importance. It is therefore surprising that an ivory panel acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum as long ago as 1933 has received so little scholarly attention. It has been mentioned briefly in print only twice, and both publications left the questions of the panel's function and its place of origin open. However, there is enough that is distinctive about it to set it apart from the mass of other gothic reliefs in ivory and to allow it to be placed in England in the middle of the thirteenth in about 1240-50.

IN October 1720 the young Flemish-born sculptorJohn Michael Rysbrack arrived in England, and, following an early association with the architect James Gibbs, quickly succeeded in attaining recognition as the leading English sculptor of the late 1720s and 30s - a position aided to some extent by the absence, at Rome, of his principal rival, Peter Scheemakers between 1728 and 1730.2 During these decades Rysbrack made contact with several patrons in the counties adjacent to Stamford, Lincolnshire, for whom he executed works that are, in some cases, as significant as his metropolitan commissions.

MICHAEL RYSBRACK'S arrival in London from Antwerp is recorded by George Vertue in a Notebook entry dated October 1720, in which Vertue also remarks that 'he was recommended to Mr. Gibbs. Architect'. Rysbrack very quickly established himself as one of the principal practitioners of sculpture in England; by 1723-24 he had already worked on monuments in Westminster Abbey to designs by James Gibbs, and had attracted the patronage of arguably the two most prominent and influential arbiters of taste of the time, Edward, Lord Harley (from 1724 2nd Earl of Oxford) and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington.

THE recent discovery of Figure (Figs.71 and 72), a long-lost carving by Henri GaudierBrzeska, is a significant event. It can be dated to c. 1914 and was first exhibited in the summer exhibition of Twentieth Century Art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in May 1914.1 The exhibition was one of several prominent ventures in that year with which Gaudier was associated. He contributed to the first number of Blast, his works were reproduced in the Egoist, he showed with the Grafton Group, was elected a member of the London Group and, as that year's chairman of the Allied Artists Association, he wrote a review of its exhibition at the Albert Hall. Gaudier's central position in the London avant-garde was in part due to the confidence he had gained through the increasing strength and originality of his sculpture and drawing.