Long considered a work by Jean-Baptiste Pater or one of his followers, the recently cleaned and treated Fete champetre (Fig2) at the Art Institute of Chicago appears instead to be an unrecognised major painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Of very high quality, it is close in style, motif, and detail to such later works by Watteau as the second version of Le Pelerinage a l'isle de Cithere in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, Les Champs Elysees in the Wailace Collection (Fig.4), the Fetes venitiennes in Edinburgh (Fig.7) and L'Ile enchantee in a Swiss private collec- tion, and would thus appear to date from c. 1718-21. Information gained from technical examination of the painting also strongly supports an attribution to Watteau, as do the work's condition problems, which are those usually and notoriously found in the paintings of this master. These inherent problems, as well as others caused by later intervention (cf. Fig. 15), have distorted several passages in the work, and partly account for its neglect by scholars in recent decades.

Two paintings recently sold at auction in Nice from a French private collection and there described as 'attributed to Pierre Peyron' have been acquired by the National Gallery, London (Figs.27 and 28).1 Investigation during cleaning has confirmed that they are both autograph works, and their place in the sequence of Peyron's working procedures, as well as their iconography, will be considered in this article.

Delacroix's own descriptions of the subject-matter of all his secular decorations for public buildings in Paris, except the last, those for the Salon de la Paix in the old Hotel de Ville, have long been known, usually from the moment the paintngs were completed and viewed by the critics. The absence of any guide by the artist to his scheme in the Salon de la Paix has been particularly regrettable since this is the only one not to have survived, having been destroyed, along with those by Ingres in the Salon de l'Empereur and by Henri Lehmann in the Galerie des Fetes, when the Communards set fire to the building in 1871. Our knowledge of the appearance of the decorations is derived almost exclusively from the drawings and oil sketches made after them by Delacroix's assistant, Pierre Andrieu,l and from preliminary oil sketches by the master (Fig.41).

In 1995-96, the paintings byJean-Francois Millet at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff, were examined in order to study the pictorial techniques and working methods of one of the foremost representatives of the Barbizon School. Between 1909 and 1937, the sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies acquired one drawing and ten oil paintings by Millet, eight of which were bequeathed to the museum in 1952 and 1963, while a ninth, Bergere assise, was purchased in 1991.l These include major pictures from every period of the painter's career, and constitute the finest group of Millet's paintings in the United Kingdom. Examination of one of these paintings Winter, the faggot gatherers (Fig.43), usually considered to be part of the Four seasons cycle commissioned from Milletby Frederic Hartmann,2 revealed new information which calls into question its inclusion in this famous series.

The past decade has been extremely rich for students of Pierre- Auguste Renoir's work, with the appearance of numerous monographs, exhibitions, and specialised studies devoted to the painter, his subjects, and his collectors.' The continuing flow of publications devoted to the impressionist movement has likewise focused attention on the artist. ' Playing a role in nearly all of these texts and exhibitions - as well as those from earlier in the century- is one principal painting: Renoir's great masterpiece of 1880-81, Luncheon of the boating party (Fig.52).