Canaletto excepted, Francesco Guardi is undoubtedly the Venetian artist of the eighteenth century most familiar to an Anglo-Saxon audience. It comes therefore as something of a surprise to realise how little is known about certain aspects of his activity and how incomplete is our knowledge of the ways in which so high a proportion of his finest work as a vedutista came to Britain. For the art historian, and not least the Italian art historian, Guardi is of course more than a mere view painter; but it is without apology that in these paragraphs no notice will be taken of his other activities which, however intriguing in the pattern of local patronage, had little wider significance even in his own time.

IN 1928, when he published The Gothic Revival, Kenneth Clark addressed a readership for whom A.W.N. Pugin was a half- forgotten name. It was his father, Auguste Charles (Fig.9) who was better known, largely for his collaboration with Thomas Rowlandson on The Microcosm of London. The balance of interest has since swung heavily in favour of the son, but the importance of Pugin Senior's books of architectural details - Specimens of Gothic Architecture, Examples of Gothic Architecture and others - is still acknowledged: they provided some of the first measured examples from which direct copying was possible. The popularity of the Microcosm and the interest of his Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London (produced withJohn Britton) also endure. And yet much in A.C. Pugin's early life and work has remained obscure.'

In 1965 the National Portrait Gallery in London acquired a sixteenth-century portrait on panel of a woman (Fig.25; NPG 4451). It had come originally from Glendon, the former home of the Lane family in Northamptonshire, where it was assumed to be a portrait of Henry VIII's sixth wife, Kateryn Parr. That same year Roy Strong reidentified the sitter as Lady Jane Grey, on the grounds of the portrait's relationship to an engraving in Henry Holland's Herwologia Anglica of 1620 ('an even closer one when the face beneath the present one is seen in the x-ray') and to a portrait belonging to Lord Hastings at Seaton Delaval, which 'has the same jewel, has always been known as Lady Jane and came from her father's castle of Astley'.' There is strong evidence, however, to suggest that NPG 4451 and the related images are in fact portraits of Kateryn Parr.

When Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios published the documents relating to the Badminton cabinet, he established that the third Duke of Beaufort ordered from Italy two entirely different coloured marble 'cabinets' which have become confused in the literature: one was a piece of Florentine commesso furniture- the Badminton cabinet- while the other was a complete marble room despatched from Rome as separate pieces of marble to be erected in situ at Badminton. The purpose of this note is to publish new visual evidence concerning the subsequent fate of the marble when it arrived.

Sickert's visit to St Ives as Whistler's pupil during the winter months of 1883-84 has been well recorded but very few examples of his work from the trip have survived. Torn Cross has confirmed in his recent book that only two works have hitherto come to light - 0n the sands, St Ives and Clodgy Point Cornwall, both painted on small wood panels in the Whistlerian manner.2 Mortimer Menpes, VVhistler's other pupil, recorded that much of their time was spent serving the Master - preparing his small panels and mixing his paints. According to Menpes, Sickert was not successfully constrained to such menial tasks, being very much his own man even at the age of twenty-three, and he almost invariably went off by himself painting pictures, sometimes five and six a day'.