WHISTLER'S Connexions with Britain, which his family maintained for decades before he himself settled in London soon after the middle of the nineteenth century, have been little studied. Whistler believed that his mother's ancestors, the McNeills, came from Barra, fancifully claiming late in life that he was Chief of the Clan. After Whistler settled in London in the 1860s, he adopted his mother's name and expressed interest in his Anglo-Irish forebears on his father's side; later he claimed a member of a First Family of Virginia as one of his ancestors.

THE exhibition This is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, from 9th August to 9th September 1956, was of major importance for young avant-garde artists and architects in England.* It gave them the op- portunity to create concrete answers to the question, hotly debated at the time, of the relation between the new art and architecture. Because of vehement disagreements be- tween the contributors, it was not a unified show. The differences of opinion were there from the initial stages of planning and manifested themselves clearly in the exhi- bition itself in the strikingly divergent approaches of the two most significant avant-garde groups. The first of these consisted of the abstract artists, gathered around Victor Pasmore, whose roots lay in the pioneer movements of Russian Conistiuctivism and Suprematism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus. The other comprised the artists and writers who had started to meet for discussions under the wing of the I.C.A. in 1952, notably Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, Richard Hamilton, and Alison and Peter Smithson, whose origins stemmed partly from Dada and Surrealism.

, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, from 9th August to 9th September 1956, was of major importance for young avant-garde artists and architects in England.* It gave them the op- portunity to create concrete answers to the question, hotly debated at the time, of the relation between the new art and architecture. Because of vehement disagreements be- tween the contributors, it was not a unified show. The differences of opinion were there from the initial stages of planning and manifested themselves clearly in the exhi- bition itself in the strikingly divergent approaches of the two most significant avant-garde groups. The first of these consisted of the abstract artists, gathered around Victor Pasmore, whose roots lay in the pioneer movements of Russian Conistiuctivism and Suprematism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus. The other comprised the artists and writers who had started to meet for discussions under the wing of the I.C.A. in 1952, notably Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, Richard Hamilton, and Alison and Peter Smithson, whose origins stemmed partly from Dada and Surrealism.

IT is thanks to the lucky survival of two of his Ledgers together with no fewer than twenty-eight of his Pocket Books ('Sitter Books') that we know so much about the career and artistic production of SirJoshua Reynolds. Furthermore, documents of one sort or another continue to turn up as work proceeds on the catalogue raisonné.

TOWARDS the end of his life, James Northcote (Fig.30) summar- ised the three months or so which he spent in Portsmouth be- tween May and September 1776, after leaving the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds where he had worked as an assistant for five years copying pictures and painting drapery: 'Having accepted the invitation of my friend Mr Hunt, I accordingly set out from London for Portsmouth, where I continued till September following, painting all the family of the Hunts and many persons in that neighbourhood at the price of five guineas a-head.' Fortunately some letters from Northcote written at the time to his brother Samuel have survived, providing further information on this early episode in the painter's long career.

HAD John Webber not been selected in 1776 to accompany Captain Cook on his last voyage around the world, he would probably have remained another forgotten figure in the early history of English water-colour painting. Indeed, the association between Webber and Cook is so axiomatic that his substantial non-Pacific œuvre has all but escaped attention. Yet even a cursory examination of his copious topographical studies made during various sketching tours on the Continent and in the British Isles from the late 1780s onwards confirms that his talents in this domain could very well have been the envy of his more illustrious contemporaries.