It has long been assumed that the two paintings by Charles de La Fosse, now at Basildon Park, Berkshire, were directly commissioned by Ralph, Earl of Montagu, later first Duke of Montagu (1707), painted during the artist's stay in England in 1690-92, and that they depict Mars and Venus and The rape of Europa.' Thus seen, they fit broadly into the classical mythological decorative scheme painted by the artist at Montagu House in London.2 This article will demonstrate that the subject of one of the paintings has been misidentified, and will suggest that the account usually given of their genesis should be revised.

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) hadjust established himself as an up-and-coming artist in Paris when in 1771 he was engaged by the German court of Saxe-Gotha in a tomb project, a mausoleum for the late Duchess Louise Dorothea. This was not only Houdon's first assignment to execute a funerary monument but also his first commission of such complexity. By the time he took over, the planning of the mausoleum had already been underway for three years, the sculptor Laurent Guiard (1723-88) having failed to carry it out. Although Houdon's project too remained unexecuted, it is important as his first commission for a foreign court and one which involved Denis Diderot and Frederic- Melchior Grimm, two prominent figures of the Parisian Enlightenment.

During the course of a joint effort to catalogue the holdings of nineteenth-century French drawings at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and the Walters Art Museum, two drawings and three documents relating to the expiatory monuments of Louis XVI undertaken at the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration were uncovered in the Peabody Art Collection.' The sheets fill a gap in our knowledge of the commissions undertaken by Louis XVIII following his accession to the throne in 1814. Moreover, they invite a re-examination of the iconography marshalled to construct a political myth advantageous to the new regime.

On 2nd May 1824 Delacroix wrote in his Journal: 'J'ai colore l'aquarelle du Turc qui caresse son cheval.' In a footnote to this entry Andre Joubin observed that this was: 'Probablement la premiere pensee du Jeune Turc caressant un [sic] cheval, toile qui figurera au Salon de 1827." The entry has not previously been identified with any extant work on paper by Delacroix. I believe it must refer to the signed water-colour in Baltimore reproduced here (Fig.22). A fin- ished work in its own right, this cannot be considered a sketch made in direct preparation for the Salon picture, which is thought to have been painted some two years later (Fig.24), but it certainly foreshadows it. Although the two works are identical in theme, the design of the painting has evolved so as to reveal the full head of the Turk, to release the stranglehold on his mount's neck and to introduce a little more movement by raising the horse's right hind-leg. Some exotic detail has also been added in the form of the ornate saddle in the left foreground, which appears to be modelled on an exhibit in the Meyrick collection visited by Delacroix in London in 1825.2

On 6th October 1608 Fra Hieronymus Varays, Procurator for the Treasury of the Order of Malta, informed the Venerable Council that the Knight Fra Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio had, while detained in the Castle of S. Angelo in the Grand Harbour of Malta, escaped from it and secretly fled from the island, thereby breaching the statutes of the Order. This eventually led to the solemn pri- vatio habitus ceremony of 1st December 1608, during which Caravaggio was defrocked in absentia of his habit as Knight of the Order.'