Women artists played an important role in the early development of European still-life painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fede Galizia in Italy and Clara Peeters in the Netherlands both had a considerable influence on the development of the genre. The importance of the former, however, has not been sufficiently recognised, and the discovery of a signed and dated still life of 1607 provides the opportunity to reassess the characteristics of her oeuvre.

For most of his life, Prince William IV of Orange and Nassau (1711-51) occupied an uncertain and tenuous position (Fig.14).' His inheritance, stemming from the Stadhouder King William III who had died without issue in 1702, was made insecure by the counter-claims of his cousins, the suc- cessive Kings of Prussia. Although these were resolved by the partitioning of 1732, William's political ambitions were realised only in 1747 when he was at last appointed Stadhouder of all the provinces of the Dutch Republic. When the position of Stadhouder was proclaimed hereditary the following year, William enjoyed a more monarchical status than had any of his forebears in the Netherlands, but his premature death in 1751 meant that he did not do so for long.

Between August 1887 and January 1889 Vincent van Gogh produced eleven still lifes of sunflowers - four in Paris and seven in Arles.' The theme has become inextricably linked with his artistic persona and creative processes, and the literature is replete with discussions of the decorative purposes and iconographic connotations he associated with these radiating chrome-yellow blooms. For Vincent these emblems of the French Midi contained 'certain qualities of colour', and expressed 'an idea symbolising gratitude' (L626).2 By the end of January 1889 he had accepted Gauguin's conclusion that the sunflower was 'the flower', and he informed his brother Theo 'You know that the peony isJ eannin's, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is mine in a way' (L57 3).

Within Goltzius's vast graphic oeuvre, there are relatively few drawings executed before 1583, the fateful year in the history of Northern European art when Karel van Mander arrived in Haarlem. One example from this early period is Arithmetic in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Fig.42), a drawing striking for the artist's generous use of red wash. In 1961, E.K.J. Reznicek recognised this image of a large, seated female figure as having been derived from Frans Floris's Arithmetica, one of a series of the seven Liberal Arts engraved by Cornelis Cort (Fig.45) in 1565; the painting itself, signed and dated 1557, has recently come to light.'

French public collections are fortunate in conserving a large number of drawings by the architect Charles Percier, whose leading role, with Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine, in various artistic enterprises of the last years of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century needs no introduction:' the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, for example, holds more than three thousand wash drawings and black-chalk sketches, assembled over the course of Percier's career and carefully classified in fourteen folio albums.2 Percier's remarkable qualities as a draughtsman can also be recognised in sheets dispersed through various French provincial museums, including Angers, Avignon, Dijon, Orleans, Rouen and Compiegne.3 A particularly brilliant sheet at Compiegne (Fig.50) may be singled out for its visionary reconstruction of an ideal museum of antiquities. One may see it as an anticipation of the Salles des Antiques at the Louvre, which Percier was later to design with Fontaine, though in a more fantastic vein; here he combines in a single gallery a quantity of celebrated pieces of ancient sculpture from disparate sources, among which are the Naples Athena, the Capitoline tripod, the S. Costanza sarcophagus, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and the Warwick Vase - to name only the most obvious.

Georges de la Tour is possibly the only French old-master painter for whom crowds would wait in line on a winter's day, as they did for the recent exhibition Georges de La Tour at the Grand Palais, Paris (closed 26th January). Is this a recognition of artistic greatness? Or is it the result of a certain media hype, founded on a lingering sense of Vermeer-like 'rediscovery', auction room sensations, ill-founded suggestions of fakery, and the odour of scandal surrounding some losses of le patrimoine? Certainly at the great exhibition held in the Orangerie in 1972, the larger public and art historians alike (including the present writer) experienced a true sense of discovery. But the wide dissemination of La Tour's images since then has perhaps blunted our sensibilities.'