John Souch is known principally for his large and impressively sombre memento mori painting in the Manchester City Art Gallery representing Sir Thomas Aston at the deathbed of his wife, painted in 1635 and signed 'Jo: Souch Cestrens fecit' (Figs.9 and 2). When C.H. Collins Baker published the picture in 1928,' all that was known about the artist was that he had been apprenticed to Randle Holme, the Chester herald painter.2 Collins Baker knew of no other work by Souch and wrote that 'it remains for Cheshire students to reconstruct his oeuvre'.

The interiors of 20 Portman Square, London,' built for Elizabeth, Dowager Countess of Home, are rightly regarded as among Robert Adam's masterpieces. It has, however, passed unnoticed that the first architect of the building, from 1772 to 1775, was not Adam but his competitor James Wyatt, the star of the Oxford Street Pantheon,2 and that at least three of Wyatt's ceilings still survive. That Adam should have been called in to transform Wyatt's architecture was a triumph of tremendous significance: he could not have wished for a more appropriate place to display his superior genius than Home House.

In 1994 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh acquired a pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Fig.35) which had long been considered lost. It was drawn in 1748 and exhibited at the Paris Salon that year, but until it was offered at auction in London in 1994 it had been known only through various copies and an engraving by Michel Aubert (Fig.34).

A series of letters from George Lucy of Charlecote Park near Warwick, written from Bath between February 1760 and March 1763 during his regular visits to the town, give a fascinating glimpse of Gainsborough's early Bath career. Lucy (1714-86), a bachelor who had made a belated Grand Tour to Italy in 1756 during which he had sat to Batoni, set about restructuring his park under the guidance of Capability Brown after his return late in 1758. His first encounter with Gainsborough, to whom he sat for two 'head' or 'three-quarter' portraits - the smallest and cheapest type the artist then produced' - was in 1760, at a time when he was also in contact with Brown, then in Bath working for Ralph Allen at Prior Park andJoseph Langton at Newton Park.2

The half-length of David Garrick (Fig. 41) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is one of Batoni's most intimate and perceptive Grand Tourist portraits.' It is so well documented - even Garrick's com- fortable purplish-brown velvet jacket survives in the Museum of London - and so pleasantly familiar through reproduction in the Garrick literature,2 that it comes as a surprise to see the portrait anew in the light thrown upon it by a contemporary source, its original owner. Richard Kaye (1736-1809)3 made the Grand Tour in 1763-64 with a companion, Mr Turton, at the same time that Garrick and his wife Eva Maria Veigel were travelling in Italy. Kaye probably met the Garricks in Bologna in late October 1763.4 He describes how he acquired the portrait of Garrick in a letter to his mother from Rome on 15th April 1764.

As the centenary of Sir Edward Burne-Jones's death approaches in 1998, it is fitting that two of his most important early paintings should have come to light. The petition to the king (Fig.42) and The princess drawing the lot (Fig.44), from the series of St George and the dragon painted for Myles Birket Foster, were last publicly exhibited in England at Burlington House in 1906.' Since then their whereabouts have been unrecorded in the literature. In fact, since 1939 they have been hanging in a dormitory at Hanover College, a small liberal arts school in southern Indiana. Although they have been seen by generations of students in Donner Hall, their subjects and history had been forgotten until I came across them in 1994.