A remarkable discovery was made in early December 2000 during excavations on the site of Coventry's medieval cathedral priory in the centre of the city. These had been going on since March 1999, under the auspices of the City of Coventry's Phoenix Initiative project, involving parts of the nave, crossing and transept of the medieval church, and considerable areas of the cloister and its Benedictine monastic buildings (Fig. 1). The church and its complex of buildings, comparable in size to those which may still be seen at Gloucester and Worcester Cathedrals today, were demolished piecemeal in the years following the dissolution of the priory in 1539.' The cathedral church of St Mary, about 130 m. in length, was the only English cathedral to be destroyed at the Reformation.

Edward Woodroofe was a surveyor and draughtsman. From 1668 to his death in 1675 he was closely associated with Sir Christopher Wren, whom he assisted in connexion with St Paul's Cathedral, the City churches and elsewhere. Woodroofe was also a notable figure in his own right. From 1662 he was Surveyor to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, and in the mid-1660s he was associated with the speculative development of Hatton Garden, Holborn. But it is as Wren's draughtsman that he is best remembered. This article sets out the few known facts of his career, describes his drafting style, and considers his place in the history of English architectural draughtsmanship.'

Unpublished letters and papers in the Whistler Collection of the University of Glasgow make it possible to document Whistler's involvement with the group of Belgian artists, critics and writers who formed La Societe des Vingt, and reveal how this connexion fostered the growth of his reputation in continental Europe.'

Joseph Wright of Derby has a unique place among the major painters of Georgian England. He alone resisted the powerful lure of London without sacrificing either his artistic standards or his intellectual ambitions. In his native county Wright's reputation was never to be eclipsed and, partly for this reason and because of the survival of his sitters book, Wright's oeuvre is better documented than that of many of his contemporaries. The enduring validity of Benedict Nicolson's exemplary and thoughtful monograph on the artist of 1968 has been confirmed by the subsequent researches of Judy Egerton and by the many pictures that have surfaced in the last thirty years.' The purpose of this note is to restore to the painter three portraits, two previously unknown and one long misattributed.

On 18th April 1886, John Ruskin sent his current protegee, Kate Greenaway, a teasing summary of his prowess as a patron: '. .. and think a little how nasty it has been for me, all my life to have Turner - Millais - Rossetti - Hunt - Jones - and Kate Greenaway, never one of them doing a single thing I say they should!' In spite of his jaunty phrasing, Ruskin is evidently aware of a distressing pattern in his relations with artists - in that long diminuendo from Turner to Greenaway. After discovering a painter and overwhelming him with enthusiasm, Ruskin would then deluge him with unsolicited and often unwanted advice until he succeeded in destroying the friendship, only to start the same process again with his next protege. Not only did he tailor paintings intended for himself to his own taste, but after introducing 'his' artists to other patrons, he would continue to intervene in the resulting exchanges.

A recent donation to the National Art Library at South Kensington of papers belonging to SirJoseph Archer Crowe (1825-96), the pioneer art historian of early Flemish and Italian painting (Fig.35), includes unpublished letters, written after Crowe's death in 1896, between his son and Roger Fry (Fig.36).' These cast an interesting light on Fry's initial career as a critic of early Italian art and his reputation within the British art world at that time.