SAMUEL PALMER'S DEPICTIONS of The lonely tower – a subject taken from Milton’s early poem Il Penseroso – rank among his most impressive later works. Repeated on a number of occasions, the composition is best known in one of its last manifestations, as an etching from 1879 (Fig.1). In this version, the isolated hilltop tower, with its single light shining out against a darkened sky, forms a particularly haunting image. It was this print that prompted W.B. Yeats to make what is probably the most famous literary reference to Palmer. This comes in the poem The Phases of the Moon in which Yeats uses the scene to shape his own commentary on Il Penseroso, talking of how ‘From the far tower, where Milton’s Platonist sat late’ could be seen ‘The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved/An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil’. This evocation of ‘mysterious wisdom won by toil’ seems particularly relevant to the later part of Palmer’s career. The meticulously crafted works of that period, replete with pictorial and literary allusion, contrast strongly with the vivid and ebullient work of his early ‘visionary’ years. However, even within this later period, The lonely tower seems to stand out for its powerfully evocative mood.

IN THE SHORT period between the accession of King George VI in December 1936 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Consort, quickly became known for her keen interest in the arts. Not only did she readily adopt the custodianship of the Royal Collection – when Benedict Nicolson was appointed Deputy Surveyor in 1939, Kenneth Clark, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (1934–44), informed him that he would be dealing directly with Queen Elizabeth, ‘who is completely charming and most anxious to know about the pictures’ – she also became an enthusiastic collector on her own account, with a particular interest in the work of living British painters. The cornerstone of her collection was laid in 1938 when she bought ‘When Homer nods’ (1915), a portrait of George Bernard Shaw by Augustus John. The purchase was reported approvingly in the press; according to an editorial in The Times of April 1938: ‘The Queen has decided that contemporary British painting matters – irrespective of subject represented or fashionable tendency in style; and it will be against all experience if, according to their means, the decision is not followed by many of her subjects – to the raising of the general level of taste, and to the practical advantage of good artists who, less from insensibility to their merits than from uncertainty about the importance of art in life, are apt to be neglected.’ In a private letter to the queen, Clark expressed the same conviction: ‘may I say how extremely valuable to all of us who care for the arts is Your Majesty’s decision to buy the work of living painters. It is not too much to say that it will have an important effect on British art in general. [. . .] Under Your Majesty’s patronage British painters will have a new confidence, because you will make them feel that they are not working for a small clique but for the centre of the national life.’ Over the next few years Queen Elizabeth’s collection came to include, as well as a number of drawings by Augustus John, works by other leading British artists, including William Nicholson, Walter Sickert, Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, David Jones and Matthew Smith. With only a few exceptions (mainly in the case of portraits) Queen Elizabeth’s approach to collecting was to purchase existing works, rather than to make commissions. When, therefore, in 1941, she commissioned a series of watercolour views of Windsor Castle from John Piper, she was making a significant departure from her established pattern.

IN THE CATALOGUE accompanying her exhibition of Mary Beale at the Geffrye Museum, London, in 1999–2000, Tabitha Barber accurately noted that ‘Mary Beale is one of the best-documented artists to have worked in seventeenth-century London’. Beale’s husband, Charles, recorded in detail her workshop practices and sitters in a series of notebooks and, although only two of these (from 1677 and 1681) are still extant, George Vertue transcribed extracts from several others dating from 1661, 1671, 1672, 1674 and 1676. Letters written to the Beales when they lived near Otterbourne in Hampshire during the late 1660s provide glimpses of their social life in that period, while aspects of the early 1660s are illuminated by both a diary of 1664–65 and retrospective autobiographical notes made by the writer and divine Samuel Woodforde, who married Charles’s cousin Alice Beale in 1661. Two manuscripts of a ‘Discourse on Friendship’ that Mary Beale wrote for her friend Elizabeth Tillotson in 1667 also survive, and Elizabeth Walsh and Richard Jeffree brought together additional biographical information relating to Mary Beale’s family and friends in their exhibition catalogue of 1975. However, even more documentation on Mary Beale exists than was previously thought. Another diary, written in 1662 by Samuel Woodforde (1636–1700), now preserved in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, provides further details about her early career and circle of acquaintances.

AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, one of the largest concentrations of paintings by John Constable outside England could be found in Philadelphia. Collectors such as John G. Johnson, P.A.B. Widener, John H. McFadden and John D. McIlhenny were actively seeking out works by the artist. From 1896 Constable’s sketch of The Marine Parade and Chain Pier, Brighton was on public display in the Wilstach Art Gallery at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, the forerunner of the present Philadelphia Museum of Art. By 1917 more than twenty-four paintings by Constable were in Philadelphia, along with an additional fifteen pictures that were then attributed to Constable but are now considered the work of imitators and followers. Acquired largely in the 1890s through London dealers, these paintings were part of notable collections of nineteenth-century art.

JOHN BRETT (1831–1902) first encountered Ruskin’s writings in 1852. His diary entry for 20th May that year records that two days earlier he had acquired Ruskin’s pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism – ‘gloriously written & containing much earnest sound healthy thruth [sic]’. He rapidly also bought the first volume of Modern Painters ‘of which I cannot find words to express my approbation’, and stated his opinion that the author was ‘one of the greatest lights of the age a man of piety deep and pure, knowledge profound, and powers wonderful’. By the end of the year he had also read volume two of Modern Painters and the first volume of The Stones of Venice, and later became familiar with The Seven Lamps of Architecture and the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters. It was this last work, subtitled Of Mountain Beauty, that evidently led to his visit to the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1856. There he encountered J.W. Inchbold, and was inspired by his work to attempt ‘in a reasonable way to paint all I could see’. The principal result was the celebrated Glacier of Rosenlaui (Tate, London), which has been described as ‘the most Ruskinian of any Pre-Raphaelite painting’, and remains perhaps the most remarkable of all Brett’s works. In June the following year Ruskin published The Elements of Drawing, a manual aimed at amateur artists and based on his teaching at the Working Men’s College in London. This book was hugely influential for at least a quarter of a century, extending its appeal beyond the amateur sphere to a number of professional artists. Frederick Walker, J.W. North, G.J. Pinwell and the young Albert Moore were among those influenced by it, and its impact on Brett was to be profound.

IN EARLY 1919, Staff Sergeant Austin Osman Spare was assigned to make some drawings at a military hospital in Endell Street, Covent Garden, by arrangement with the doctor in charge. Spare was one of a small group of war artists working for the medical section of the Imperial War Museum, London, with a brief to record medical subjects relating to the First World War. The majority of the works were produced in studio conditions, with artists mostly drawing or painting from pre-existing photographs, or staged reconstructions with models. But the assignment at Endell Street Military Hospital, for a drawing of an operation in progress, was to be carried out on location.

AN EARLY WORK by Bridget Riley, Continuum, originally made in 1963 and subsequently lost, has recently been recreated under the artist’s supervision for the exhibition L’œil moteur: art optique et cinétique, 1950–1975, on view at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (to 25th September). Although Continuum is three-dimensional in that the free-standing support on which it is painted is curved and allows the viewer to walk into and be surrounded by it, it relies essentially on the reaction between the viewer’s eye–brain visual system and the painted black-and-white image on its surface. In this sense it is distinct from many of the other works on show in Strasbourg, in which the image-surface itself may be physically three-dimensional, sometimes incorporating movement provided by motors (rather than the ‘eye as motor’ of the exhibition’s title) or dependent on colour effects supplied by pigment or lighting. It is remarkable to see Continuum in this context, for it relies on none of these devices. The present writer, seeing the work in Strasbourg, found it an extremely powerful experience, the black and white of the surface assuming rapid changes of colour, at one moment looking, respectively, a deep, electric purple-blue and a very pale yellow. From other viewpoints, bands of red, blue and green shimmer and vibrate at the periphery of vision, while the point in focus remains static. Sparks arise in swarms and flow in different directions across the surface, which in places can appear three-dimensional.