Ruskin and Millais spent the summer of 1853 together at Glenfinlas in the Trossachs.* There, under Ruskin's strict supervision, Millais produced a picture which, they planned, would revolutionise British landscape painting and portraiture. Their ambitious friendship, which was to end so disastrously at the close of the following year, had begun soon after the critic came to the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites in letters to The Times in May 1851. On 2nd July that year Millais wrote that he and Ruskin 'are such good friends that he wishes me to accompany him to Switzerland this summer'. He adds: 'We are as yet singularly at variance in our opinions upon Art. One of our differences is about Turner'.' The mention of Switzerland, Turner and differences is significant. Ruskin was anxious to reconcile and develop his apparently contradictory and controversial championships of Turner and of the young Pre-Raphaelites. He thought he could achieve this by introducing the Pre-Raphaelites to mountain scenery of the kind painted by Turner, central to his own aesthetic; hence his stay with Millais at Glenfinlas.

Near midnight on 1st September 1939, Pablo Picasso and his mistress Dora Maar left Paris for Royan, a small resort town near Bordeaux.' At dawn that morning the armies of the Third Reich had invaded Poland and, as Picasso neared Royan, the crowded roads were lined with horses requisitioned for the army. By the following June, with an estimated one-fifth of the population of France fleeing the advancing German armies, the road to Bordeaux would overflow with refugees in buses, in cars, in horse-carts, on bicycles, on foot, some dying of starvation, some killed by German bombs destined for bridges.2 But even in September, the atmosphere in France was ominous, and Picasso had no sooner reached his destination than he was forced to return to Paris for papers of permission to remain in Royan.3 While he was in Paris, the shrill shrieks of air-raid sirens sent him to a bomb shelter as anti-aircraft gunners shot at imagined bombers.'

The first four lots in Delacroix's posthumous sale, which was held in Paris from 17th-29th February 1864, were described in the catalogue as 'Esquisses desfigures occupant les caissons du plafond [du Salon du Roi]', each measuring 16 by 35 cm. and representing La Justice, La Guerre, L'Industrie, L'Agriculture. However, an annotation in the margin to this description in a copy presented to Maurice Tourneux in 1871 by Philippe Burty, who catalogued the drawings for the sale, firmly states: 'Ces 4 tableaux esquisses n'etaient certainement pas de Delacroix. M' Piron, le legataire, a declare" qu'ils ne seraient pas vendus. Il en a fait present de deux a Etienne Arago, qui en etait ravi, & les deux autres ont ete vendus a un employe de la Monnaie'.'

Otto Dix was the most feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920s. Sitting for a portrait by him required strong nerves. Dix preferred to choose his own models and then to magnify their weakness or foibles on the canvas. However, his sitters included prominent lawyers, businessmen, and art-dealers, as well as poets, dancers, prostitutes and the glittering demi-monde of the Weimar Republic.

Almost nothing is known of Francis Bacon's very first exhibition beyond the fact that it was put on by the artist himself in his studio- flat in South Kensington in London at some time in 1929. It appears to have consisted of paintings (all subsequently destroyed) together with furniture and rugs designed by the artist.' A little more is reported of the second show he organised in his flat, an exhibition shared with his friend the Australian artist Roy de Maistre (or Roi de Mestre as he was then known). The date of this show varies in the literature but most commentators follow the chronology established by Ronald Alley in the 1964 catalogue raisonn6 of Bacon's work and place it in the winter of 1929-30 when the artist was twenty years old.2 It is assumed that the exhibition, attracting attention to Bacon as an interior designer rather than as a painter, prompted The Studio to publish a brief, illustrated notice of his modernist rugs and furniture (Fig.44) in its August 1930 issue.3

In 1923 the industrialist Samuel Courtauld gave £50,000 to the Tate Gallery in order to set up a fund with which to buy modern French paintings because he felt that 'the Modern Continental Art movement deserves to be better represented in the National Collections'.'