WHILE THE AUTHORSHIP and patronage of the wall paintings in and around Westminster Abbey’s south transept remain uncertain, their art-historical and technological significance is clear. The paintings, which appear to have belonged to a sumptuous and far more extensive decorative programme embracing this part of Henry III’s spectacular new abbey, represent the pinnacle of wall painting in England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Owing to the destruction of Westminster Palace by fire in 1834, the depictions of the Incredulity of St Thomas and St Christopher carrying the Christ Child (Fig.1) in the transept’s southern arcade, and of St Faith (Fig.11) in the adjoining chapel, are among the only mural survivals from the Plantagenets’ London court. Moreover, painted on a thin white ground and subtly modelled in translucent layers of organically bound pigment, they epitomise the technological transition which occurred in this period towards a more complex wall painting technique born of the pursuit of luminescence.

DURING RECENT RESEARCH in the archives at Hatfield House, Joseph Friedman discovered a remarkable elevational drawing (Fig.25). Measuring over 1.5 metres long on three sheets of paper originally pasted together, it can be identified as a long-overlooked design of c.1605–10 for a ‘Porticus’ in the riverside garden of Salisbury House, the Strand palace of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, built between 1599 and 1613 (Fig.26). Hitherto the Salisbury House Porticus has only been known from an elaborate specification in the Public Record Office, London, written by an unidentified ‘Osburne’, which describes in extraordinary detail the proportional and constructional features of a two-storey colonnaded building to be erected at the end of the garden of Salisbury House, overlooking the River Thames (see the Appendix below). The elevational drawing of the Porticus in the Hatfield House archives is the corresponding scale drawing for this specification and is in the same hand. As far as we know, the Porticus was never built. As a design, however, it is one of the earliest manifestations of Vitruvian classicism in the history of English architecture.

I STARTED AS an Assistant Keeper, Grade II, at the Tate Gallery in London on Monday 13th September 1954. I reported to the front desk and was taken to the spiral back staircase that led up to the offices sited under the central dome above the main entrance. I quickly learned the trick of opening one of the double iron gates at the foot of those stairs, by pressing a catch concealed in the thickness of a transom in the right-hand leaf. Until then, I knew only the public areas of the Tate, and was intrigued to go back-of-house. All the bomb-damaged galleries had been repaired by early 1949, but the outer walls at the corner of Atterbury Street and Millbank bore, as they do still, the scars left by an exploding bomb that blew in the glass roofs of many galleries in 1940, and rendered them unfit for use.

IN THE FRANCISCAN Library at Killiney, outside Dublin, there is a fourteenth-century manuscript copy of the Opus moralium distinctionum of the Franciscan writer Arnald Royard (d.1334). Preceding the text proper on fol. is a dedicatory address and a miniature showing the author in episcopal cope and mitre kneeling to present his open volume to the Angevin king Robert of Naples to whom the text is dedicated (Figs.44 and 45). The king, crowned and seated on a bench, is shown against a background of gold fleurs-de-lis with the red label that distinguished the Angevins heraldically from the royal house of France from which they derived. Behind Bishop Arnald stands St Francis holding a book and displaying the stigmata that he received from the Christ-like seraph that hovers above his head. At the bottom of the page are three roundels containing bust-length figures of Franciscan saints: at the right St Claire holds her lily; in the centre is a figure in episcopal vestments, most probably St Louis of Toulouse, although, unusually, he is bearded (Fig.46); and at the left is a saint who has been identified as St Francis but who, since he has no stigmata, is more likely to be St Anthony of Padua.

A HIGHLY IMPORTANT cache of ‘newly discovered’ documents concerning the Walpole family has recently come to light. The papers are lodged at the National Archives in Kew, with the legal records of the Chancery Proceedings, but without having been sorted or listed in the relevant catalogue. The complete set relates to events following the death of Sir Robert Walpole in 1745, specifically to the legal case of Lady Henrietta Cholmondeley (sister-in-law of Sir Robert’s eldest daughter, Mary Walpole) and creditors, versus Sir Robert’s grandson, George, 3rd Earl of Orford, Sir Robert’s sons Edward and Horace Walpole and their family, together with Sir John Willes, Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas. Although the original chancery roll that records the full claims and counter-claims presented to the Master of the Rolls has yet to be fully catalogued, the outcome of this family litigation is a remarkably full set of inventories compiled in mitigation of the pleadings for the defence. These throw some new light on the story of the sale of the pictures at Houghton Hall as it progressed through the second half of the eighteenth century.