Jean de Julienne's Oeuvre grave de Watteau of 1735 included three engravings of paintings then located in England. The plates were engraved by the French artist Bernard Baron, who had moved to London in 1712 and perhaps met Watteau there in 1720.' One of the paintings, Les deux cousines, belonged to Baron himself while the other two were, as noted on the engravings, from the 'Cabinet du Dr Mead, Medicin du Roy de la grande Bretagne a Londre'. Although one of these, L'amour paisible (Fig.3), is now lost, the other picture, Les comediens italiens (Fig.4), figures prominently in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and has received considerable scholarly attention over the past century.

The troubled history of Degas's Place de la Concorde of 1875-77 (Fig.8) has inevitably affected its treatment in the literature. Max Liebermann, Julius Meier-Graefe and others wrote about the picture with the benefit of having seen it.' Those who discussed it after the Second World War were less fortunate, and had to base their discussion on reproductions alone. Political changes have now made it possible to view the work itself in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, and technical examination of it has revealed some significant fresh information. The present article considers the painting in the light of these technical findings, details the significant changes and additions made by Degas from first to last stage and examines its relation to the topography of the place de la Concorde.

The visitors' book of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is a curious anomaly in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. In a collection that contains over three million works on paper, the majority of which are old-master prints and drawings, it is a surprise to find a volume containing such a wealth of drawings by an extraordinary number of twentieth-century avant-garde artists within the 156 gilt-edged pages of this red leather- bound book. Artists such as Picasso, Miro, Man Ray, Dubuffet, Tipies and many others who visited the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s and I960s provided drawings for the book which is one of the lesser-known treasures of twentieth-century art belonging to the British Museum.

Nicolas Poussin's landscape paintings stand apart from those of his contemporaries not only for the grandeur of their designs but also for the complexity of their subject-matter. With few excep- tions, they share the dimensions of his history paintings, and thus are considerably larger than most examples of this genre produced in seventeenth-century Europe. Only the landscapes by his fellow French expatriate in Rome, Claude Lorrain, rival them in ambition, scale and thematic richness. The subjects that Poussin introduced into these majestic vistas are frequently new to the genre - Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, the giant Orion searching for the sun, Ruth amid the alien corn - and some remain unique. Lacking the detailed classical training of earlier centuries, few educated modem viewers would know about the Athenian general Phocion had not his betrayal, death, burial and eventual exoneration inspired two of Poussin's greatest landscape paintings.' If the search of the cynic philosopher Diogenes for an honest man is familiar enough to inspire a joke in the New Yorker, where he once appeared searching with his lantern for an honest dealer amid a wasteland of used car lots, his philosophical epiphany on seeing a boy drink water from his hands, thus rendering even the possession of a bowl unnecessary, is not part of our popular mythological culture. Even Poussin's public had rarely seen this moment portrayed and never in so grand a landscape setting as in Poussin's depiction of the theme (Louvre, Paris).

The biography of Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-89; Fig.49) was written by his son and this document remains the primary source for establishing the different stages in Liotard's life, including, among other things, the circumstances of his artistic training in Paris.' However, the discovery of an apprenticeship contract among the notary holdings of the Archives nationales, Paris (see the Appendix), now permits us to verify these biographical elements and gain a clearer understanding of the artist's education.