In 1852 the forty-year-old Edward Lear received tuition from the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt and began four paintings, of which he had completed three by the end of that year. All three have since entered public collections: The mountains of Thermopylae (Bristol City Art Gallery), Reggio. Calabria (Tate, London), and Venosa. Apulia (Toledo Museum of Art, OH). The fourth, finished in spring 1853 and exhibited at that year's Royal Academy, has not been seen in public since 1857, when it was selected to represent the artist at the great Manchester Art Treasures exhibition.' Known as The quarries of Syracuse, it was first exhibited with the title The City of Syracuse from the Ancient Quarries where the Athenians were Imprisoned BC 413 (Fig. 1). It was bought at the Royal Academy by Frederick Lygon, later 6th Earl Beauchamp, at whose family seat, Madresfield Court, the picture still hangs. The painting was discussed, but not illustrated, by Allen Staley in The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (1973),2 and it was not included in the comprehensive survey of Lear's work shown in 1985 at the Royal Academy, where the subject was represented by a drawing and an oil sketch.3 The painting is here published for the first time; recent cleaning has revealed it to be the strongest of the group of paintings done under Hunt's influence, and the most important of Lear's early oils.

The recent acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum of an album of drawings and prints which belonged to Alexander Constantine Ionides, including works by Calvert and Blake, makes it possible to throw much new light on the early artistic contacts of the Ionides family, who made a magnificent bequest of pictures to the Museum in 1900.

The General Post Office - One Minute to Six (1860) by George Elgar Hicks (1824-1914), in the collection of the Museum of London (Fig.29), is one of the finest examples of 'modern life' painting produced in the Victorian period. After Frith's famous images of contemporary society, it stands as one of the most important visual expressions of London life in the mid-nineteenth century. Hicks's painting of crowds rushing to meet the deadline of the six o'clock post conveys a striking statement about the pace of activity in the city, about the behaviour of the crowd and the role of the centralised post and press system at the heart of a vast empire.

A small painting of the Ruins of Kenilworth Castle (Fig.38), recently given to the Juniata College Museum of Art, Huntingdon, PA, can be firmly attributed to Thomas Cole (1801-48).' Painted in oil on millboard and measuring 25.4 by 35.6 cm. (10 by 14 ins), the work came to the museum with an attribution to Seth Eastman (1808- 75), the American painter of western and Native American scenes. However, it bears little resemblance to Eastman's style, and there is no evidence that Eastman ever travelled to Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. Instead, stylistic analysis of the painting, an inscription on the reverse of the millboard and a letter from the artist make it clear that the Study was painted by the Hudson River School master, Thomas Cole, in 1841 at the beginning of his European tour, to serve as an aide memoire for a later composition.2

Since the appearance of the catalogue raisonne of Charles Gleyre's work in 1996,' with over a thousand entries in the corpus, no additional paintings or drawings by him had emerged until four drawings of Near Eastern subjects surfaced at auction in 2001.2 These were sold under the name of Prisse d'Avennes, but can be shown to have been executed by Gleyre in the context of his sojourn to the Near East in 1834-35, if not necessarily directly in situ. While one of the drawings is easily identifiable within Gleyre's catalogued oeuvre, the remaining three present intriguing problems in relation to the artist's Near Eastern work and its later provenance."