The relationship between Roger Fry (Fig.3) and the British art establishment was an extremely complex one. In 1911, having just turned down the directorship of the Tate Gallery, he wrote to his mother: 'So I must give up the idea of official life and titles and honours, which I very willingly do ... I once wanted those things but I now feel quite indifferent to them." Although he was much involved with founding and advising - even interfering with - institutions, he was not by nature an institutional figure, and he disliked committees. But there was one institution with which Fry's association could hardly have been closer or more enduring, and that was The Burlington Magazine. He was intimately concerned with the plans for the new journal in 1902, he was a hyper-active member of its Consultative Committee from the first issue in March 1903 until his death, he was co-editor from 1909 to 1919, and he almost single-handedly saved the Magazine from financial ruin in 1903-06.3 On 6th March 1911 he again wrote to his mother of the Burlington: 'although it pays me very little it is getting to be a more and more important work and one that I have much at heart.'

In November 1903, August F. Jaccaci (Fig.I8), an American editor who was then engaged in preparing a fifteen-volume series on private collections of paintings in the United States, instructed his agent in Europe about the attitude he should adopt when approaching the editors of the newly founded BURLINGTON MAGAZINE: 'try to impress [them] as an equal', he wrote, 'not as an amateur or collector in search of information." A few years later Jaccaci became the editor of the 'Art in America' section of the Magazine, a short-lived initiative which ran from 1905 to 1910. However, the relationship between Charles Holmes and Roger Fry, successive editors of the Burlington on the one hand, and on the other Frank Jewett Mather Jr and Jaccaci, editors of the Magazine's 'Art in America' section, was never quite one between equals, based as it was on differing views of the section's scope and purpose, which ultimately resulted in the project's demise.

When Giorgio Vasari credited Jan van Eyck and his countrymen with the early development of oil painting, his commentary on the medium included a short synopsis of Netherlandish painting. It is in this context that we find the earliest simultaneous references both to Hugo van der Goes and to one of his still-extant paintings. The remark is frustratingly brief: 'Ugo d'Anversa, chefe la tavola di Santa Maria Nuova di Fiorenza' ('Hugo of Antwerp, who made the painting at S. Maria Nuova in Florence').' Yet Vasari's marginal comment made the Portinari altar-piece (Fig.29) the touchstone for all subsequent attributions to Van der Goes.

With an Act of Parliament in 1833, Sir John Soane ensured that his house and all its contents would be maintained in the state in which they would be left when he died: it is this which has given rise to the belief that all Soane's possessions are still housed there, even though Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey has shown this on several occasions not to be the case.' The existence of a considerable collection of nearly five hundred drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum has long been known,a and the Montreal version of the recent exhibition on Soane has brought the collection of his works held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture to wider attention. In both cases the reasons why this material exists outside Soane's original collection can be traced back to one man: Charles James Richardson, Soane's last pupil, who subsequently became his assistant.

Although the documentation in recent years of the careers and reception of Italian artists in seventeenth-century France has been considerable, the contemporaneous presence of Flemish and Dutch masters in that country has been far less studied. A case in point is the career of the landscape painter Herman van Swanevelt, known in France by his first name 'Armand'. In spite of increasing interest in his long and successful stay in Rome, where he travelled from his native Netherlands (he was born in Woerden in c.I604), and the recent studies by Blume and Steland,' little is known of his period in Paris where he established himself in 1643-44 and where he died eleven years later. Indeed, his position in the Parisian art world has appeared elusive, even contradictory. He received notice and acclaim from foreign biographers but French commentators on art scarcely mentioned him, so much so that one began to question how well known he really was in the French capital. The discovery of unpublished documents in the Archives nationales, Paris, namely a marriage contract and a posthumous inventory (see the Appendix below), provides new biographical facts and, above all, reveals the extent of his Parisian success, to which he contributed by his astute management of his professional affairs.

One of the first great collections of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings outside the Dutch Republic was formed by the Palatine Electors in Germany. Its founder was Johann Wilhelm (1658–1716), who resided in Dusseldorf.' His brother and successor Karl Philipp (1661–1742), who moved the court to Mannheim, added little to the collection but the latter's nephew and successor Karl Theodor (1724–99), on the other hand, was an avid collector. The Palatine Electors belonged to the house of Wittelsbach and when the Bavarian branch of the family died out in 1777, Karl Theodor became Elector of Bavaria. He settled in Munich where, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the collections of the Palatine Electors were united with those of the Bavarian Electors, and most of the pictures once owned by Johann Wilhelm are therefore now in Munich. The most important collector of the Bavarian house of Wittelsbach had been Elector Max Emanuel (1662-1726). Together the collections of Johann Wilhelm and Max Emanuel form the nucleus of the holdings of the Alte Pinakothek.