SURPRISINGLY little is known for certain about the working procedures of even the best-documented painters of the eighteenth century. That SirJoshua Reynolds's procedure involved – at least occasionally – the making of preliminary oil sketches is attested by the existence of a small group of authentic examples of which the Marlborough family group (Fig. 1) in the Tate Gallery is perhaps the best known. Two questions immediately arise. First, what rôle did such sketches play in Reynolds's practice? (Did he paint them for himself, as part of the process of composition, or for his assistants to work from, or to show the customer?) And secondly, how many genuine sketches can be identified today?

IN 1856, the year after he married Effie Gray, his ambition heightened by financial need, John Everett Millais sent five paintings to the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy. Four of them, The blind girl, Autumn leaves, Portrait of a gentle- man and L'enfant du rigiment, picture children in various situations of comfort or distress. The fifth, Peace concluded,1856, represents two children as part of a domestic scene. Not yet a father, Millais was preparing for the rôle.

VISITORS to Bath Abbey today admire the predominantly gothic splendour of its interior; their eighteenth-century counterparts enjoyed a rather different ambience (Fig.26). A huge organ loomed over the entrance to the choir, a flamboyant altar-piece was the fobcal point at the east end and several hundred memorial tablets clung to every pillar and wall. The proliferation of these memorials in the eighteenth century prompted Dr Henry Harington's famous epigram:

These walls so full of monument and bust
Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust

A LETTER of December 1795 from the Director of the French Academy at Rome to the Surintendant des Baitiments in Paris contains an account of the English Neo-classical painter, Guy Head:

Head, peintre anglois, se distingue beaucoup, tant dans les portraits que dans l'histoire. Parmi les premiers, ceux de MM. Hope frres, celui de M. Hipsley, Anglois, et celui d'un petit enfant, fils de Mylady Webster, sont tres resemblants et tres beaux; parmi les seconds, c'est-a- dire parmi ceux d'histoire, Atide, qui porte du Stix au ciel le flafon d'eau qui doit servire pour le serment des dieux, est tris beau; le paysage est de la plus grand beaute'. (.. .) Junon, qui refoit de Vinus sa ceinture qui enchaine les coeurs, et Antigone, qui brile des parfums sur le cadavre de Polinice, forment le sujet des deux autres; ces deux tableaux sont au-dessous du premier et ont ite' faits antierieurement, ce quifait espe'rer de plus grands progris de la part de ce peintre.

ONLY a small number of original works are attributed to the English painter Guy Head (1760-1800),' who has been considered primarily as a copyist since the publication shortly after his death of Edward Edwards's Anecdotes of Painters. Edwards wrote pejoratively of Head: 'one might be led to suppose that he had no other idea of the method of study in art than the constant employment in making copies, a slavish process, by which no solid acquirements can ever be made'. Among contemporaries, however, Head enjoyed considerable reputation and patronage as a painter both of portraits and histories. The identification of his composition Oedipus and Antigone in the gallery of the academy at Parma (Fig.36) is therefore of some interest, the more so since the painting further contributes to our recognition of Head as one of the most assiduous collectors of Italian academic credentials among British artists visiting Italy