Memory is a fragile thing. This should be kept in mind when looking at the records of the judicial investigations concerning works of art held in 1660-61 in Antwerp. The procedures were set in train when the Antwerp canon Francois Hillewerve became suspicious about a series of paintings showing the twelve Apostles and Christ which he had bought for 1,900 guilders in the conviction that they were original paintings by Anthony van Dyck. Not long after the purchase he became convinced that he had been cheated, and began a lawsuit in which almost all the important painters of Antwerp in the end had their say. The records relating to this event give a wonderfully lively picture of the art world at that time. Much has already been written about the case, but a new document gives some important new information which provides a fresh lead.'

As is apparent from his stunning Bathsheba in the Louvre (Fig. 11) and Young woman in a brocade gown in the Wallace Collection (Fig. 10), Willem Drost was one of Rembrandt's most gifted pupils, and it is therefore not surprising that he has been studied primarily in the context of the Rembrandt school. While his biography remained clouded in mystery until recently, not a few former Rembrandts have been added to his oeuvre in the past twenty years. Among these are works of the quality of the Sacrifice of Manoah in Dresden, and no less a painting than the Frick's Polish Rider has been put forward as a possible future addition.' It was less than a decade ago that Sebastiaan Dudok van Heel pieced together an identity for the artist. A Willem Janszn Drost was baptised in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on 19th April 1633.2 Although there is no document to prove that this was the future artist, the year of birth, and the fact that one of this Willem's brothers, Claes Janszn Drost (1621-89), was an ebony worker makes the hypothesis a likely one.

'The aforementioned Federigo also very much admired a portrait of a Countess, full-length and life-sized, dressed in black satin, most excellently accurate and well-made by the art-full Holbeen; he got to see it in the company of painters and art lovers at the house of Lord Pembroke in London; it pleased him so much that he said he never saw anything like it with regard to artistry and neatness in Rome .. ..." Thus Karel van Mander reports in his Schilder-boeck of 1604 a conversation between Federigo Zuccaro and Hendrick Goltzius. It is an exchange which contains a tantalising, if hitherto unsubstantiated, claim - that Zuccaro, during his 1575 visit to England, saw Holbein's Christina of Denmark (Fig.30) at Baynard's Castle (Fig.3 1), the London home of Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke (?15 34-1601).2

The main purpose of this note is to provide an interim report on discoveries made during the cleaning and restoration of the study by Van Dyck of a bridled grey stallion (Fig.35) which was formerly in the Gambier-Parry collection at Highnam Court and was sold at Christie's, by a direct descendant of Thomas Gambier Parry, on 13th December 2000 (lot 30), when it was bought on behalf of the present owner.'

Correcting errors of one's own is a duty perhaps more insistent than correcting those of others. The purpose of this brief note is to correct an attribution which I advanced in this Magazine just over forty years ago, when I proposed that a drawing in the British Museum (Fig.39) constituted Salviati's preliminary study for his fresco of the Visitation in the Oratory of the Florentine Confraternity of the Misericordia in S. Giovanni Decollato in Rome, completed in 1538 (Fig.40).'