The Paris views of Charles Meryon have appealed to print connoisseurs since they first appeared in the 1850s. Among their earliest admirers were Charles Baudelaire, who wished to contribute to a never-realised collaborative edition of Eaux- Fortes sur Paris, Felix Bracquemond, who etched a portrait of Meryon which was included in the series (Fig. 10), and Philippe Burty, who compiled the first catalogue raisonne of Meryon's etchings.2 This admiration has seldom waned, and the prints have remained popular not simply for their record of Paris before the transformations effected by Baron Haussmann or their technical brilliance, but also for their romantic, slightly sinister, portrayal of medieval sites as filtered through Meryon's individual and tortured sensibility. The nature of that sensibility, and a possible autobiographical content to the images, are the subjects of this article.

Begun in the autumn of 1905, Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein (Fig. 11) was the result of eighty or more separate sittings. In April 1906 Picasso painted out the whole head, and soon after both painter and sitter (Fig.12, seen here in a photograph taken five years earlier) left Paris.' When Picasso returned from Gosol in mid-August, he completed the painting in the absence of his model. Both Picasso and Stein were pleased with the results, as she records in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: And when she saw it he and she were content'. Stein's well-known account has given rise to much speculationabout the creative process that led to the final painting. Questions have arisen about the appearance of the initial sketch, the changes or difficulties that might explain the many sittings needed to complete the work, and the stylistic influences that lay behind the creation of the face. The handling of Stein's compelling image betrays an uneasy mixture of two different styles: within this discrepancy, and in particular, in the handling of her face, lies the future direction of Picasso's art.

Paul Nash painted Landscape at Iden (Fig.25) in 1929, a year in which his sense of mortality had been heightened by his father's death in February.' In this article I suggest, on the basis of the literary and critical influences informing Nash's work, that Landscape at Iden should be grouped with the several works linked to the theme of death which Nash produced that year.

The nature of the artistic roots of German Expressionism, leading up to the founding of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen and the Blaue Reiter, has long been of interest to scholars. Up to now it has not been clear exactly to what extent artists in Dresden, Bonn, Munich and Berlin - among them Kirchner, Pechstein, Macke, Marc, as well as the circle around the Russians Kandinsky and Jawlensky - knew works of the French avant-garde. Too often commentators have simply noted the fact that French artists were exhibited in Germany, rather than asking what was actually shown. An important example is the Gauguin exhibition of 1905 at Weimar, which has not hitherto been reconstructed in detail.' This is all the more surprising since it was in the same year, not too far from Weimar, in Dresden, that Die Brucke was formed, the artists' society whose name symbolises the point of departure in early twentieth-century German art.

In his essay, 'The Object as revealed in Surrealist Experiment', published in This Quarter (an English language journal based in Paris) in September 1932,' Salvador Dali compiles a list of pro- positions for new surrealist actions or 'experiments', and includes the following suggestion.

In March 1998 the National Museums and Galleries of Wales purchased Stanley Spencer's Souvenir of Switzerland (Fig.47).' This large triptych, with an overall framed size of 123 by 308 cm., was painted in 1934 for Sir Edward Beddington-Behrens (1897-1968), a prominent economist and merchant banker who had served on the secretariat of the League of Nations. An enthusiastic patron of contemporary art, he bought a Picasso head while an undergraduate in 1920, and was a patron of Wyndham Lewis and Oskar Kokoschka, as well as of Spencer.2 Beddington-Behrens had been introduced to Spencer some years earlier by his uncle Sydney Schiff, an early patron of the artist who drew his attention to the monumental cycle at Burghclere painted for Louis and Mary Behrend in 1927-32.' During the summer of 1933 Beddington-Behrens invited Spencer to stay with him in the mountainous Saas valley, high in the Canton of Valais in southern Switzerland. The upper village of Saas Fee, linked by a bridle-path with the lower village of Saas Grund, was one of the most popular summer resorts in the Valais, especially with British visitors.