On 16th November 1940 the Birmingham Gazette carried the headline: 'Coventry - Our Guernica.' It was followed by one of many reports on the eleven-hour raid that had destroyed two-thirds of the centre of Coventry during the night of 14th-15th November. The comparison with the destruction of Guernica on 26th April 1937 was not entirely just: it implied that Coventry was, like Guernica, a peaceful civilian city, whereas in fact it was active in the manufacture of armaments and aircraft. The undeniable similarity lay in the severity of the blanket bombing. London had been the chief target when the Blitz had begun in August 1940, but by the autumn the German air force had turned its attention to the more compact targets offered by provincial cities. At Coventry, where industry, housing and public buildings were contained within a central area of between one-half and one-third of a square mile, the effects were devastating: 568 people were killed and 863 severely injured.

When considering the iconography of Queen Anne it is primarily the portraits of her as an adult that come to mind, such as those painted after her marriage, by painters such as Willem Wissing, and those after her accession, most notably by Godfrey Kneller.' However, as a child she also sat to Peter Lely, Principal Painter to her uncle Charles II.

When George Vertue visited Christ's Hospital in the City of London in 1723, he characteristically recorded all the significant paintings that he saw there. These included, in addition to Antonio Verrio's enormous commemorative picture of the enthroned James II surrounded by City and Hospital officials, two portraits of Charles II: 'a painting at length [sic] K.Charles 2nd with many mathematical instruments on the ground' that, like Verrio's canvas, hung in the Great Hall, and 'another of him in garter robes in the Mathematical School with globes and other instruments'. A few years later, Vertue again described the pictures at Christ's Hospital, although he mistakenly cited their location as the nearby St Bartholomew's Hospital. He noted that Verrio's 'vast long picture' had by this time been moved from the end to the side wall of the Great Hall, and a window had been added where it had formerly hung. He also described in that room 'a very large picture of K.Charles at lenght standing [with] mathematical Instruments painted by Baptista Gaspars'. Today, this 'very large' canvas (Fig.24) depicting Charles II, measuring approximately twelve by ten feet, hangs in the library of Christ's Hospital in Horsham, but it is no longer attributed to Gaspars. After having been regarded as the work of either Lely or Verrio, it was assigned to Marcellus Laroon the Elder by Robert Raines in 1967, on the basis of doc- umentation in the minutes of the Court of Governors of Christ's Hospital. All subsequent references to the painting have incorporated Raines's attribution but, in fact, his reading of the archival evidence was incomplete. This article not only re-attributes the portrait to John Baptist Gaspars and explains Vertue's initial recording of two similar pictures at Christ's Hospital, but also provides insight into the dynamics of public patronage in late seventeenth-century London.

To honour the centenary of his death, at the end of 1998 the Tate's Patrons of British Art purchased for the Gallery Aubrey Beardsley's Frontispiece to Chopin's Third Ballade (Fig.27). At first sight this appears to be a straightforwardly witty, perhaps even charming image of a woman on a horse, with something of the pantomime or theatre about it. But this is by Beardsley and thus it contains a range of references, both iconographic and ideological, that slyly combine to subvert and pervert the apparent simplicity and innocence of the image.

Dora Sly could be an invention of Alan Bennett. The fullest account of her life, drawn upon extensively in this introductory paragraph, was given by Marjorie Lilly who knew her during the First World War as a denizen of 8 Fitzroy Street in London's artists' quarter.I The house was full of rooms occupied by painters and their friends. Walter Sickert, who from 1915 until the end of the War rented Whistler's former studio at the back of number 8,2 called Dora Sly 'the Fairy Queen on the top of the Christmas tree' because her bedsitter was but one storey below the attic of the tall house.

At first sight, Andre Derain and Julia Margaret Cameron make unlikely bedfellows. Indeed, The unsentimental classicist of twentieth-century French art, renowned for his restless intellect and satiric wit, seems poles apart from the pioneering photographer of mid-Victorian England, steeped in the aesthetics of G.F. Watts and Lord Tennyson. But Derain was, according to his friend Clive Bell, a great admirer of Mrs Cameron's photography, and his Portrait of an Englishwoman of c. I919 (Fig.37), now in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, is a close transcription of Cameron's 1872 photograph (Fig.3 8) of her niece Julia Duckworth (nee Jack- son). Perhaps because this is one of Cameron's least familiar images of a sitter of whom she made more than fifty other photographs, it has not previously been identified as the source of Derain's painting. Although no documentation exists for Derain's use of this particular image, his choice of it can almost certainly be accounted for by his connexions with the descendants of the photographer and her subject.