The turning point in Anton Rafael Mengs’s career came in 1761 when he accepted an invitation from the King of Spain, Charles III (1716–88), for whom he had previously worked in Naples, to come to Madrid as court painter. The ten years that he spent in Madrid were the most productive of his career. Named Primer Pintor (First Painter) in 1766, he made portraits of members of the Spanish royal family, frescoed the ceilings of the Royal Palaces in Madrid and Aranjuez with mythological scenes and decorated their oratories and chapels with religious images.

THE LIFE OF John Frederick Lewis abounds in teasing gaps in our knowledge. Even the year of his birth is a matter of some doubt, although 1804 now seems more probable than 1805. Lack of documentation, or contradictory documentation, at certain key periods is one reason for this uncertainty; another is Lewis’s personal reticence, something we find even in 1855–58 when, as president of the Old Water-Colour Society, he was obliged to fulfil a more public role. It is therefore satisfying to report an episode in the artist’s life that is reasonably well documented. The collection of sixty-three watercolour and gouache copies of old-master paintings by Lewis in the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, was briefly discussed in Michael Lewis’s book on his great-great-uncle, but remains little known, and hardly any of the works have been reproduced. The present article concentrates on the strong representation of Spanish painting in the collection, but first some account must be given of the events that led to the decision taken by the Royal Scottish Academy to acquire this group of works from Lewis.

THE CALVET AFFAIR is an episode on the margins of art history and one that is virtually unmentioned in the biographies and critical studies of Picasso. But when the case reached the front pages of the French daily press in May 1930, there is no denying that it contained all the necessary elements to capture the public’s imagination: a famous person, money and strong human emotions. Throughout these press reports, Picasso was presented as a celebrity, one whose stature was magnified by references to his youth and early career, and to a group of works that, unlike many of his subsequent productions, appeared to the public as accessible and not difficult to appreciate. Nevertheless, the incident involved more than a flurry in the press and a minor court case, for it occupies an interesting place in Picasso’s history. At the age of almost fifty, the artist found himself suddenly and unexpectedly confronted for the first time, not only by his past but also by the question of the legacy he would eventually leave behind. He was faced with the problem of posterity, intensified by the frenetic rate, since childhood, of his artistic production, whose full scale was just then revealed.

AT THE END OF 2003 the Museo del Prado, Madrid, purchased a head-and-shoulders portrait of a man by Velázquez (Fig.25), an important addition to the Museum’s holdings of the artist’s work. It filled a gap in the Prado’s collection for, until then, it included no portraits painted during the artist’s second voyage to Italy (1649–51). Traditionally identified as depicting the ‘pope’s barber’, the new acquisition is of great quality, and demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary skill as a portraitist. The work has not always received the attention it deserves, however, primarily because, until its purchase, it was in private hands and beyond the reach of scholars. Its simplicity of presentation and the unknown identity of its sitter have also contributed to its low profile. Nonetheless, all the specialists who have had the chance to study the work have confirmed its high quality. This article draws new attention to the work, sets out as much information as is known about its date, examines the hypothesis concerning the identity of its sitter and considers the work’s significance in Velázquez’s output as a portraitist.

A RECENTLY DISCOVERED document connecting a follower of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo to the export of paintings to New Spain sheds light on the transmission of the artist’s style to the colonies. In the document (see the Appendix below), dated 27th June 1678, the Sevillian artist Juan Simón Gutiérrez, who has been called ‘the foremost painter during the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, and a faithful exponent [of Murillo’s style]’, refers to a shipment of thirty-three devotional paintings destined for the colonies of New Spain. This is the first known case of a follower of Murillo exporting his work to America.

IN OCTOBER 2003 the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired a polychromed wood sculpture of St John of the Cross (Fig.1). This article attributes this remarkable work, made in 1675, to the Sevillian sculptor Francisco Antonio Gijón (1653–c.1721).