In a previous article discussing the chronology of scrolled leg or 'horsebone' chairs, I used the bills of Thomas Roberts (royal chairmaker from 1686 to 1713), together with a number of important surviving examples of the horsebone type, to argue that this form of chair remained fashionable for much longer than is commonly supposed. As I showed, many of these chairs have stylistic and structural attributes which, if Roberts's bills are to be relied on, take them into the early years of the eighteenth century.' This in turn casts doubt on the currently accepted chronology of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century seat furniture, and indeed on our more general perceptions of the 'Queen Anne' style. Similar doubts arise from the study of another important baroque seating form, the 'cross-frame' chair. This was the phrase used by Thomas Roberts to describe a chair with diagonal rather than conventional H stretchers. Chairs of this type are thought of as typically 'William and Mary' and are usually dated to the 1690s,2 but the bills of Roberts and others again show them being made in large numbers well into the eighteenth century. In addition, there are a sufficient number of documented survivals to establish a coherent chronology of their style and development over a period of about twenty years, from the mid- 1690s to the early years of George I.

This year is the bicentenary of the death of the eighteenth- century jeweller and goldsmith James Cox. In his own day, Cox enjoyed great fame as a creative entrepreneur and show-man, aided not only by considerable personal ability but also by a precocious attention to publicity. It is perhaps surprising then that, although a pioneering biographical account of him was published by Clare Le Corbeiller in this Magazine as long ago as 1970, many details of Cox's life and work have remained tantalisingly incomplete.1 It now seems timely to review the current state of our knowledge about this 'ingenious artist'.

Edward Burne-Jones had good reason to be more than usually sensitive to the effect of framing on his paintings. His father was a carver and gilder, and he had been brought up between the show-room and the workshop of a house whose pilastered facade resembled a renaissance altar-piece.' Furthermore, his introduction to contemporary art came through the Pre-Raphaelites, by whom the frame, clothing the naked picture, was considered integral to a work of art. In his early years, as we shall see, he experimented with frames which, like his paintings, were strongly indebted to the decorative designs of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. Thereafter, as he adopted more classicising influences in his work he turned to neo-renaissance models, particularly the so-called aedicular frame which was taken up in the 1860s by William Holman Hunt and Lawrence Alma- Tadema,2 becoming less dependent on his contemporaries for their design and producing his own distinctive creations.

The Rothschild alfabeguer (Fig.40) is one of the finest pieces of fifteenth-century Valencian lustreware to have come down to us and, in view of its original function - a plant-pot - its survival in such good condition is little short of miraculous. It was last published in 1944, when it was in the collection of Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris,' and after many years of seclusion it has now been lent by Lord Rothschild to Waddesdon Manor, where it forms the centrepiece in a cabinet of pottery above the fireplace in the Smoking Room, complementing the display of early sixteenth-century Seville tiles below. The present article aims to put this splendid object into its historical context, reviewing the evidence, both documentary and archaeological, for this type of pot, and discussing the material from the fifteenth century.